PatientFollow Project
Our database collects patient ward stays, which means the data of a patient may be processed by several collectors during the admission. This leads to extra, wasted work of different collectors familiarizing themselves with the same patient. We are looking at ways to reduce this waste.
Specifically, we are looking into having a single collector/laptop follow a patient for their whole admission, and how our processes would need to change to accommodate this, and what extra tools we might need.
Pilot
- one or two collectors at HSC will do collection like this for specific patients in coordination with main office to better understand how this would work
Identifying admissions / Starting collection
Currently patients are assigned to collectors/laptops based on where they are admitted. To change to the new system, we would need to identify patients who enter a given site and then assign them to the collector pool equitably.
Currently, our thought is that this will be done based on the last two digits of the chart number. We think chart numbers would work because
- determine if those last digits are equally distributed
- determine total EFT per site, and percentage of total of a given collector
- assign a portion of last digits of charts to each collector
- for example, if a site has 3 collectors that are each a .5EFT, each collector would get 33% of that site's new admissions, so collector A might get charts ending in 00-33, collector B 34-66, and collector C 67-99
Entering into the laptop
The initial ward would need to be entered as usual. For stays on subsequent wards we would add functionality to CCMDB that helps copy the data that would be the same (similar to the Patient copier button discussed before). Copyable data we have identified are:
- Actual Demographics
- Visit Admit Date and time
- ICD10 Comorbids
Thoughts?
As usual, if you have thoughts or ideas about this, please post them here.