Performance
Different Initiatives for EMR System Errors
Doctors and nurses can solve the erroneous identification of patients in the EHR system in many ways. Some doctors pay attention to the transportation of patients between hospitals and departments. They believe that transportation should not involve students or volunteers whose work is not paid. For the transport of patients, orderlies and trained people should be applied, whose attention and responsibility will be directed to the patient and information about him. Some physicians are also suggesting an increase in staffing for the CT department. These proposals are associated with an increase in the staff to a greater or lesser extent. Another similar recommendation is to include a dedicated technologist in work and monitor the data. This technologist will be assigned to, for example, the CT department and will check the images. Such a technologist may have an education in engineering, IT, or specialized education in medical electronics. Communication between departments should become more substantial, which will help to communicate information, preventing errors from having negative consequences quickly. For example, nurses should improve communications between the emergency and CT departments and between neonatal care and maternity wards.
In some cases, it is considered rational to refuse ward numbers, as this will help to avoid piling up data. Patients should be addressed more frequently using their names rather than internal codes and numerical values; sometimes MRN can be used. It will be harder to achieve distraction reduction as hospitals are often overwhelmed, sometimes at specific times of the day. Some doctors advise introducing additional staff into the work during periods of increased workload, but this can cause a lot of inconveniences (How to fix problems with electronic health records, 2020). Doctors recommend introducing pre-test pauses to check patient data. However, the best way to reduce the number of errors in the EMR system is the introduction of printers on wheels (WOW); these printers print two-dimensional barcodes with no analogs. The barcode initiative will propose improving the collection and storage of patient data, as well as its ordering.
Determinants of Success
It is expected that the number of cases related to incorrect testing of analyzes the issuance of the wrong medicines will decrease, and this will be the leading indicator of improving the qualitative result. Overall, the new barcode initiative will bring more order to clinical practice (Monica, 2017). It will be especially noticeable in neonatal care, where babies cannot identify themselves, say their name, or notice a mistake, such as on an identification tape attached to the wrists of patients or their beds.
Implementation
Communication Channels for Plan Implementation
Perhaps a complex problem will be the transportation and use of the system of printers on wheels, WOW. Nurses will be required to receive detailed instructions on using the system. Perhaps there will be problems for the older generation of nurses, wary of innovation. Nurses must protect printers from damage, such as when accidentally touched by patients. Communication between departments will necessarily include the involvement of persons from other structures, engineering, and electronics. Mechanics will need to set up printers, which will need to be done quickly; otherwise, nurses will have to deal with queues of waiting patients. Perhaps the hospital will have to create a small department of mechanics who will take on the role of quick maintenance specialists. Close relationships will be established between medical departments as an experiment to test the implementation plan; these departments will be the CT and emergency departments. They will check for speed and accuracy of the introduction of bar codes and the introduction of printers. The nurses of these departments will check whether it is convenient to use portable printers, whether they often break down, whether data is lost or confused.
Data Interpretation Between Hospital Colleagues
Inside the hospital, it is planned to use percentages and results in the form of numbers. To understand whether there are improvements compared to previous results, they need to be compared and correlated with each other. Therefore, it is planned to move away from the percentage where errors are more than half, since “64% claimed that patient misidentification errors happen more frequently than the reported industry standard of 8-10%” (Choudhury, & Vu, 2020, para 7). Errors are expected to decrease quickly: “Scanning wristband barcodes resulted in a 57.5% reduction in medical errors” (Choudhury, & Vu, 2020, para 14). It is planned to interpret the data in the key of quantitative analysis, which will clarify the implementation’s success (Gibbson, 2019). Nurses need to understand whether the performance was successful, how successful it was, and whether it would be rational to promote it in the future. Printers require financial and mechanical support, which can burden hospital administration. Therefore, the administration must understand that the costs are worth the high developments.
Suggested Implementation and Patient Care
This initiative will impact the quality of services provided in the hospital, as it will reduce the chance of errors in patients receiving care. Treatment will be faster, unnecessary checks will be useless, and nurses will not waste time on it. The new implementation will give more excellent support to the neonatal care and pediatric units. Patients in these departments may not introduce themselves, and kindergarten-age children may lie and play with the nurses. Before implementation, neonatal nurses usually used the first and last names of mothers and indicated the sex of the child born. However, this did not always help them, and there was a possibility that similar names could be confused or forgotten.
There are widespread names and surnames, and nothing strange in the fact that women with the same surname can give birth to a child of the same sex at the same time. The most profound thing in this aspect is that the baby’s body is very susceptible to outside influences, and doctors’ mistakes can harm the baby in the future. The lack of immunity and the body’s inability to fight will have a detrimental effect on taking the wrong medicines or an incorrectly placed dropper for a child.
Hypothetical Effect of the Initiative
Overall, the barcode and printer initiative could help protect patient data even more closely. The introduction of barcodes does not mean a loss of privacy and safety for patients, and they should understand this. The hospital will continue to take care of the security of patients’ data (Copeland, 2019). Nurses may need to explain this to patients wary and suspicious about sharing their personal information. One can say that barcodes will encode patients’ data even more strongly, and it will be impossible to read them without special training or equipment. At the same time, such implementation will make the healthcare system even more dependent on information technology and artificial intelligence. This implementation will probably make the data transmission system opaque, frightening some patients. Such an implementation requires high trust in doctors in general and in the Boston Medical Center in particular.
References
Choudhury, L. S., & Vu, C. T. (2020). Patient identification errors: A systems challenge | PSNet. Patient Safety Network. Web.
Copeland, C. S. (2019). National patient safety goals: Accurate patient identification. Vitalacy Inc. Web.
Gibbson, M. (2019). Patient identification errors are the most common EHR generated issues. Web.
How to fix problems with electronic health records… (2020). AltexSoft. Web.
Monica, K. (2017). Researchers discuss problems, solutions to patient identification. EHRIntelligence. Web.