One little barcode. One big step forward.
Barcodes are everywhere. They get mail delivered on time, groceries tallied and paid for, and they help us accomplish hundreds of other daily tasks that used to be done by hand. Who would have thought that a series of black lines could condense work that once took hours down to a minute or a few seconds?
Jen Piette, Copley’s Director of Respiratory Therapy, shows off the new EKG barcode scanner.
Turns out, a simple bar code is creating significant operational efficiencies and time savings in Copley’s Respiratory Therapy department. According to Jen Piette, Director of Respiratory Therapy, (pictured) a new program called Epiphany makes it possible for patient medical data to be transferred to Copley’s EKG machine with the scan of a bar code. “We can scan a patient’s bracelet, which populates all of that person’s medical data into the EKG machine,” said Piette. “No more inputting information manually. And, it’s faster, more accurate, and has practically eliminated the possibility of human error.”
According to Piette, it’s a project that has been in the works for nearly two years that required working hand-in-hand with Copley’s IT department to ensure that information stored within separate software systems – Copley’s outpatient and inpatient medical records, the EKG management software company, and the EKG machine manufacturer – could be accessed, condensed, and shared with the EKG machine at the time of a patient’s appointment. The barcode is the key. “Once the EKG is completed, information flows back into the patient’s medical records, which can be viewed by their doctors and other providers both inside and outside of the hospital,” said Piette.
A procedure that, according to Piette, used to take many hours and multiple departments, now takes a minute. “We went live with the barcode on November 7, and we’ve been testing and auditing the system since then,” Piette said. She added with a chuckle that the only gap she has encountered is timing: “It takes almost a minute for everything to show up on the EKG machine. A minute. I guess we can live with that.”
Click here to learn more about Respiratory Therapy services at Copley Hospital.