Staff follow patients with tracking system
Using a home-grown tracking system, staff at Burdin Riehl Ambulatory Care Center of Lafayette (LA) General Medical Center follow customers through their outpatient experience, pinpointing a patient's location at any step in the care process, says Jeri Pack, admissions and diagnostics manager.
"We can tell how long they waited in the lobby, which room they are in, and we have a function that says they are en route, which means they are being escorted," she says. Staff can check the computers in every room or the big-screen monitors in both the clerical area and the nurses' station in the perioperative area to determine a patient's status.
When the procedure is completed, the patient is escorted to the front desk and discharged. Although it's not necessary to formally discharge patients, the system has laid the groundwork for an upcoming hospital requirement, Pack says.
"We are now in the process of building and implementing an on-line clinical documentation system. A requirement of that system is that every patient be discharged."
Since every room has a PC, whoever is providing the patient's care enters his or her location, Pack explains. During surgery, surgical nurses do the tracking. During busy times, it's difficult to maintain constant updates, and some steps may be skipped, she says. However, the time when the patient enters the system and the time of discharge always are recorded.
"On a day when we have 270 patients, we're not sticklers [about tracking], but on normal operating days, we do very well," Pack says. "We get two reports from that system that print at night. One shows all of the patients and their activity - when they start the process, when they're assigned a room, and when they're discharged - and another report is a compilation [of patients] by physician and by day."
A former employee in the hospital's information systems department designed the tracking system, using Pack's diagram of patient flow as a basis. In operation since the center opened, the system was a response to another troublesome aspect of the former outpatient culture. Not only were outpatients waiting behind inpatients for services, but as patients moved around in the various phases of treatment, family members were constantly looking for them, Pack explains.
"We're in the heart of Cajun country, and this is a very family-oriented culture. Cajun families travel en masse to the hospital to support grandma, grandpa, sister, brother, even for outpatient procedures."
With the tracking system, staff no longer spend time calling different areas to locate a patient. It also comes in handy when a physician calls and asks why it took so long to take care of a patient. In one recent case, Pack recalls, it was because the patient had gone to lunch. Thanks to the tracking system, "I can say exactly who it was, why it was, and when it was."
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