Emergency rooms are some of the most hectic workplaces in America. With daily arrivals of trauma patients and other patients in major distress, processes often break down in the face of life-and-death emergencies. In situations like these, hospitals must rely on their established systems to ensure that required documentation and other workflows are completed as designed to ensure the highest levels of patient safety.
One closely regulated supply that most emergency departments carry, and that they must document with high standards, are bloodbags. These are crucial supplies for extreme trauma cases where blood needs to be provided to the patient. During these trauma cases, processes are not always followed due to the extreme pressure placed on staff to move with speed in order to save the patients who come in. While that may be their reality, hospitals still have to keep accurate records of their bloodbag usage for accreditation and billing purposes.
Today, most hospital emergency departments rely on manual systems or cumbersome electronic systems to keep track of their bloodbag documentation. Due to the extra time required to fill out these manual logs or interact with burdensome electronic solutions, data may be captured in an incomplete manner or skipped altogether. This leaves gaps in bloodbag documentation that jeopardize a hospital’s ability to pass accreditation inspections, and may also lead to missed revenue or incomplete medical records due to missing data.
To adequately track usage information around bloodbags in a busy emergency department, hospitals need an electronic documentation system that gathers crucial information without requiring a lot of extra work from employees. This will ensure a high level of compliance by staff, improving the department’s accreditation compliance and charge capture. iRISecure – Blood Tracking was introduced to capture documentation around bloodbag usage with minimal effort from staff. The system utilizes “touch-free” RFID technology to capture pertinent information, such as serial numbers, blood type and expiration dates, at the point of dispensation from the blood storage refrigerator. The system automatically associates the blood information to the patient and interfaces with your electronic medical record (EMR) system to send that information directly to the patient record. With this system in place, accreditation surveys will be a breeze and you’ll capture 100% of bloodbags used while reducing the documentation burden on your staff.