Hospitals are always concerned about ensuring a positive patient experience, improving staff efficiency, and reducing out of pocket claims for lost patient property. The COVID-19 crisis has made meeting these goals more challenging. IntelliTrack® Patient Belongings Tracking can help health care organizations adapt to new situations brought on by COVID-19. Here are some examples:
1. Relatives are not permitted in patient rooms, and therefore cannot take a patient’s valuables and property home
More property to manage means more administrative work for nurses and other frontline staff. Patient Belongings Tracking makes the property collection process more efficient and accurate. Users take advantage of checklists to quickly document what is being collected. Capturing photos and entering short notes adds more detail about condition, brand, and other property attributes. The solution also utilizes barcodes to capture the patient ID from a wristband as well as barcodes on property bags, containers, or large individual items to maintain an accurate record of all property a patient turns over.
Property storage locations are also tracked using barcodes. Locations are scanned when the property is assigned for storage. Property can be stored in multiple locations such as storage bins or safes, and each interaction with the employee (such as storage and retrieval) is tracked so that the location of the property is known by the system at all times.
When it is time to return belongings, a scan of the patient’s wristband shows where all property is located, ensuring that no belongings are missed during retrieval. All items can then be reviewed with the patient when returned.
All of this ensures that staff can collect, manage, and return patient belongings as efficiently as possible, facilitating data entry, and reduce time spent looking for lost property.
2. To minimize contact with patients’ property, Nurses may not be able to properly inventory belongings.
When contact with patient belongings is limited, photographs can assist with documenting exactly what property has been collected. Patient Belongings Tracking allows for multiple photographs to be captured for both an item or a property bag.
3. Some hospitals reportedly are using opaque biohazard bags to store COVID patients’ property. These bags may get misplaced, or may not be transferred along with a patient if they are moved to another facility.
Patient Belongings Tracking tracks every property bag stored for a patient and utilizes a barcode scan of the bag at retrieval to “check off” that staff has collected all patient property, ensuring no property is missed. Additionally, Barcoding, Inc., can provide property barcode labels that specifically identify the bag as patient belongings without needing to see contents.
4. Patients may not be able to sign for the property
As part of the normal Patient Belongings Tracking workflows, patients review and sign for the property collected and returned on the mobile device. Understanding that patients may not be able to sign, the application allows for the user to record if the patient is unable (or unwilling) to sign.
Patient Belongings Tracking provides a simple, efficient method to track the storage of patient valuables and property while allowing healthcare professionals to focus on patient care.
Contact us to find out how we can work together to make your team more efficient, accurate, and connected with mobile solutions like IntelliTrack Patient Belongings Tracking, and more.
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