Good Samaritan Hospital (GSH) of Vincennes, Indiana, a 260-bed facility serving southwestern Indiana and southeastern Illinois, has been a PatientWorks customer for years. They selected the PatientWorks solution to replace their existing in-house application that utilized custom queries on QuadraMed Affinity and Barcode Blaster thermal printers.
They also printed face sheets on pre-printed forms. “Prior to using PatientWorks, we had dot-matrix printers which were high maintenance – only the first page was legible and the rest were not,” says Chuck Christian, Director of IS. “The old patient ID bands had a high failure rate due to the illegible barcodes. We had a very low scan rate due to the fact that the labels were being placed inside the armband and the pouch would bubble up on many of our patients.”
GSH’s PatientWorks application prints facesheets and radiology orders. They are currently expanding the application to print patient identification packets. This includes laminated adult, pediatric and BUFA (baby up for adoption) armbands and charge labels on stock that feeds through a standard laser printer – all barcoded to ensure proper identification. A patient record is sent from QuadraMed Affinity to the PatientWorks server where it is merged with their electronic documents. Fields in the data stream tell PatientWorks which printer to route the print job to, as well as the tray selection and number of copies. “With the new armbands, we get a very high scan success rate,” says Christian. “Positive patient identification is a key component of our process. We barcode the patient to identify them to the system, barcode the drugs, then the staff can identify them when giving out meds.”
GSH likes PatientWorks because it is easy to use, built with standard technology and comes with “superior support”. They now have the flexibility to make form changes immediately, to add forms to the application and easily add barcodes to any documents including armbands and labels. Their registration process is much more efficient and error proof.