Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Status Update

Our electronic patient status board lists all patients in the department so we can tell at a glance  which ones are  waiting to be seen, who is in what room, which doctor or nurse is assigned, what tests are finished or pending.  Kind of like Facebook.    It is the nurses' responsibility to discharge the patients off the board when they leave the department for good.  For added fun, last week the word "dirty" popped up on the status board when the patient was discharged.  Just to add 20 more steps to an already cumbersome and non-user friendly system, this necessitated entering "clean" when, obviously, the room was ready for another patient. 

We complained, of course, since the nurses at this facility have to do the discharging, cleaning, and removal from the status board.  The Information Techies must have been having a slow week taking turns offering Kudos to themselves on the Bitch Board about  how awesome and effective their department is because they got right on it. 

Now, to enhance the happy, happy, joy, joy, how wonderful for us to use only positive language, our status board no longer pops up the "dirty" notation.

Now it says "Unclean". And we still have 20 oh-so- convenient steps to change it. 
Dislike.  Bastards.

2 comments:

Orfyn said...

Yeah, we have a system for posting patient charges for our OR. It takes five steps to find an item, four more to charge for it. Many items are not in the database, so we are then expected to add the item to a list for the system administrators, only seven more steps. All this while you are dealing with all the problems of an actual surgical procedure taking place in real time. I swear the folks who sold this crap to the hospital took the upper brass out, got them drunk and laid, taking pictures to hold over them.

thethingspatientssay said...

Perhaps you should leave the "dirty" notation up for those hygienically challenged patients.