Safer Patient Transportation with Wristband Scanning

Everyone knows any healthcare environment is highly pressurized. The timely transport of patients within a hospital is just one of many daily challenges.

If you multiply that figure with the number of in-hospital and between-hospital transports for other purposes – scans, treatments, or surgical procedures – it becomes a very complex and time-intensive workflow.

Therefore, the opportunity to improve patient safety and save time throughout a hospital stay is essential to increase the efficiency of patient transportation.

Verify patients on the move: from admission to discharge

Patient identification anywhere in a hospital is a compliance must-have, not only for safety but also for security reasons. When admitted to a hospital, patients receive a wristband barcoded to contain all their identification data (ID) information.

As well as patient ID data, barcodes can also connect clinicians with other patient information such as medical records, medical condition, medication needs or any allergies. Despite this, it’s fair to say that many hospitals still use time-consuming manual methods to validate a patient’s identity when performing nursing tasks such as bedside medication administration or taking specimens for analysis.

The same can be said for porters or healthcare staff involved in patient transportation around a hospital or between hospital campuses.

Watch the video to see how Scandit is automating hospital workflows:

Scanning a patient’s wristband to accurately verify their identity as they move between wards and hospital departments is the perfect remedy for ensuring patient safety and saving time as a workflow process improvement. Many hospitals already use an Epic Rover app integrated with Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK on mobile devices to record documentation and conduct barcode validation at the point of care, typically the patient bedside.

Patient identification via their wristband, from their admission, throughout transfers and to their discharge is also easy with the addition of Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK within Epic Rover for Grand Central – an app used by organizations to track in-patients from their arrival to their transportation inside the hospital and eventual departure.

Implement a smart scanning pocket assistant for your hospital transporters

In a typical workflow, a hospital will place a patient transport request in Grand Central of where a patient needs to be transported from and to. Once assigned to a transporter – usually, the first available one – the request comes across with the patient’s ID information and details of how they need to be transported.

From that point, the transporter acknowledges the request on their mobile device, which alerts everyone that they have received the job. Once they are on route to retrieve the patient, they mark the transport as in progress.

With the simple addition of scanning capability integrated into the Epic Rover Grand Central transport app, transporters can take their smartphone from their pocket, scan the patient’s wristband and validate that the information they have on the job matches what’s on their wristband. This supplements verbal verification with the patient.

It’s an ideal way of validating that they are transporting the correct patient if they cannot verbally speak to them. All it requires is to activate scanning capability within Epic Rover for Grand Central. Scandit’s high-performance scanning can be integrated within a matter of hours.

Improve patient satisfaction with smart data capture

By identifying a patient with a fast, single scan of their wristband, hospital transporters can get the right patients to where they need to be with minimum fuss. Instant real-time visibility of a patient’s identification details can bring many other benefits too, for example:

• There’s no need to unduly disturb a patient if they are asleep or drowsy due to medication or a surgical procedure.
• If a patient is visually or hearing impaired, wristband scanning is much less intrusive and makes verbal checks more robust.
• It’s also a good safety check for patients who have neurodegenerative diseases, for example, Alzheimer’s disease and may find communicating personal details difficult.
• The speed and accuracy of verification give hospital staff more time to spend caring for patients.

The Epic Rover Transport app has contributed to a 33% boost in overall patient satisfaction due to patients spending less time waiting for beds when admitted. The faster turnaround is due to transport staff being able to manage their transport requests from a flexible and familiar smartphone.

And at a primary US healthcare provider, the smartphone app powered with Scandit smart data capture technology led to time savings of 3 to 5 minutes per patient transport.

Doing more in hospitals for less

Many hospitals already equip their staff with smart devices, be it phones or tablets. But even if that is not the case, the total cost of ownership of a scanning-enabled smartphone substantially undercuts that of a dedicated scanner.

Scandit’s software delivers exceptional scanning performance at a fraction of the cost of dedicated scanners.

Scandit’s barcode scanner for Epic Rover already gives authorized clinicians instant access to patient data with a simple scan of wristbands on everyday mobile devices.

It helps with clinical workflows, including blood product scanning and Barcode Medication Administration (BCMA). Integrating Scandit into Epic’s Rover Transport app couldn’t be easier and is a further way of automating and streamlining critical clinical workflows.

Learn more about how Scandit is helping to mobilize healthcare workflows. Or to discuss how we could integrate Scandit to help with your patient transportation and patient identification, please contact us to set up a call.