4 Critical IT Considerations: Evaluating Patient Wristband Solutions

When evaluating a patient wristbanding solution, sure, it’s important for IT decision-makers to consider business and performance issues such as cost of ownership, ease and efficiency of use by staff, and comfort for the patient. But let’s start with the most critical consideration—the impact of your choice on patient safety!

Consideration #1: Enhancing Patient Safety

Bar Code Image Quality: Thermal vs. Laser Printing

It’s critical for wristbands to remain readable and scannable throughout the entire patient stay.

• Thermal printers are optimally suited to produce 2-D symbols and very small bar codes, and can produce small labels to precise tolerances—a challenge for laser printers.
• Laser printers produce images by projecting small dots onto the page, which does not allow for the superior edge definition that squares provide.
• Furthermore, laser output is susceptible to toner flaking and smudging. This can lead to low image quality and repeated scan attempts, which may jeopardize both patient safety and staff productivity.

Wristband Material and Image Durability

Output from printers on inappropriate materials may result in fading, smudges, scratches or wrinkles, which will lead to bar code read errors and the need for reprints and replacements.

• To protect against typical hospital environmental conditions like moisture and chemicals, laser wristbands require a laminate overlay. If the overlay is not applied correctly, the bands may be prone to condensation, bacterial buildup, or smudged or smeared bar codes.
• Thermal wristbands include a special top coat. Testing has shown Zebra’s Z-Band® thermal, top-coated wristbands are scannable after repeated exposure to water and common solvents. See how Z-Band Comfort bar coded wristbands can even withstand hand sanitizers in this video.
• Thermal printers and coated wristbands produce smudge-free, highly durable bar codes that are readable for up to 14 days, while laser-printed wristbands may require replacement every 2-4 days.

MR Safety

Could the wristbands present an additional hazard or risk to a patient undergoing an MRI procedure? Zebra Z-Band wristbands were tested by an independent MRI testing company and were determined “MR-Safe.” Read more in the white paper Laboratory Testing of Zebra’s Z-Band® Direct Thermal Antimicrobial Wristbands.

Learn more about improving patient safety here.

Next, we’ll take a look at Consideration #2: total cost of ownership.

Have you washed your hands today? – The smart patient room

The efforts to develop new technologies in order to eliminate sources for medical errors more often include the approach of so-called “Smart Solutions.” Last week, a Smart Patient Room moved from the lab to the real world: GE started the pilot at the Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y. 

The smart patient room is designed to track staff adherence to protocol, such as washing hands, consistent clinical rounds, and monitoring to ensure that a patient doesn’t fall. Optical sensors, RFID tags, facial recognition, computer vision algorithms, cameras and speakers provide real-time monitoring of clinicians’ work to generate insights and help manage their workflow.

The goal: Determine what process and behavioral changes can create a safer patient environment.

“According to the Institute of Medicine, medical error is the eighth leading cause of death in the USA, accounting for an estimated 44,000 to 100,000 preventable deaths per year.”

We’ll keep you posted about the first results of the pilot and the lessons learned for the future. But one thing is already clear today: Another smart way to enhance patient safety, avoid medical errors and improve your hospital’s workflow is to use 2-D coded wristbands and mobile bar code labeling at the bedside.

Read the whole articles: http://www.smartplanet.com/business/blog/smart-takes/ge-healthcare-smart-patient-room-pilot-begins-promises-real-time-monitoring/10754/ or http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/GE-Tests-Smart-Patient-Room-to-Monitor-Patient-Safety-Cut-Medical-Errors-866750/

Learn more about bar coding at the point of care: Zebra/Healthcare

3-D thinking: Visions of Positive Patient ID

The main patient safety goal of many hospitals has always been to “improve the accuracy of patient identification,” mostly with bar coding solutions.

But before deciding which specific solution you should purchase—make sure your hospital’s bar coding vision is clear! Otherwise you might end up purchasing products that are not user-friendly, are not integrated well enough, or are just work-arounds and are never used.

Bar coding in the hospital

Although it might cause a lot of trouble and effort to define your Bar coding at the Point of Care (BPOC) vision—it is worth having a clear goal for all stakeholders.

I found an interesting article that recommends doing some investigation as a basis for your vision:

1)     Depth perception:

• Where are the Points of patient ID in our hospital?
• Where is the highest risk / Where are the most problems?
• What do we have today? / What do we lack?

2)     Breadth perception

• What’s out there / What is working well?
• How can we benefit from synergies?
• Integrated vs. stand alone BPOC?

Further, the author explains that bringing the depth and breadth perception together is not just an x/y diagram—it requires 3-D thinking and means a complex integration of all factors and impacts like:

• Budget
• Networks
• Vendor readiness etc.
• Existing Paperwork
• Procedures
• Devices
• Timeframes etc.

Read the whole article:

I’ve been thinking about hospital game plans for improving the accuracy of patient identification

Learn more about bar coding at the point of care with these White Papers:

Benefit from bedside specimen labeling

Adopting bar code labeling in hospital pharmacies

Patient Safety Applications of Bar Code and RFID Technologies

NY annual report: Manual data management source for infections and errors in hospitals

Over the last weeks, several states published their annual reports on hospital-acquired infections.

One important determination the New York’s annual report makes is that hospitals need to integrate health information technology systems to enhance infection prevention and reporting efforts.

Seventy percent of hospitals are still entering data manually!

An effective way to prevent infections and medication errors is to use positive patient ID solutions – starting from 2-D bar coded wristbands to mobile bedside specimen labeling.

We do have some great examples of how hospitals measurably reduced error rates, improved patient safety and found an easier way for caregivers to do their jobs efficiently and effectively:

Read South Vermont hospital:  http://www.zebra.com/casestudy

See Morristown Memorial Video Case Study: http://www.zebra.com/video-casestudy

Read the original article: http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/14133/

Read the whole report: http://www.nyhealth.gov/statistics/facilities/hospital/hospital_acquired_infections/

See Patented IQ Color at McKesson, Cerner Health Conferences

If you happen to be at the McKesson Insight User Conference this week, or the Cerner Health Conference Oct. 10–13, don’t miss seeing how hospitals are using patented IQ Color direct thermal ink technology for printing color on demand—adding different visual cues to wristbands, pharmacy labels, and STAT labels as needed.

Visit Zebra’s booth—or see the video to see the technology at work, and its benefits over preprinted materials.

IQ Color is just the tip of the iceberg as far as how Zebra is helping healthcare facilities ensure patient safety and improve process efficiencies. Discover more.

5 challenges for Implementing RFID in Hospitals

Hospitals, like any other organizations, benefit from advanced tracking solutions. Better visibility of critical hospital equipment leads to better operational efficiency which can have a positive effect on patient safety.

However, implementing RFID technology in a hospital has its unique challenges. Here are 5 things to consider for and RFID implementation in a medical facility:

The first challenge is the business pain point that needs to be addressed. And this shouldn’t be a simple desire for “better tracking” Clear identification of where the blind spots are in your asset management and what degree of location accuracy should be addressed first.

Second, what metrics/ goals will be tracked? Is the primary goal to increase utilization of equipment or is better inventory management and location tracking more important? The answer can be all of the above but setting the metrics of an RFID solutions up front will better determine effectiveness after installation.

The third challenge is the hospital itself. Hospitals present unique challenges because unlike warehouses and retail floors, there are many floors and even more rooms.  Identifying where reading should be done such as doorways or ward entrances is one issue, but deciding what degree of location identification is required also needs to be addressed. Is knowing that a respirator is somewhere on a floor enough or pinpointing exactly which room it is in desired?

The fourth issue is looking at the degree of criticalness of the assets.  Non-critical assets such as computer equipment or maintenance equipment may not need location identification beyond the floor they are on but location information of critical assets such as ventilators, defibrillators and dialysis equipment may needed to be measured in feet versus floors.

The last issue is the equipment tagging itself. A lot of medical equipment is metal so tagging needs to be done appropriately to prevent misreads due to the metallic interference with the reader.

The key to managing many of these challenges is identifying an Integrator– now that RFID is gaining momentum in the healthcare space, new integrators are coming onto the scene with little or no experience. Selecting an integrator with experience planning and installing RFID systems is essential to meeting the challenges of critical medical devices tracking.

For information on Zebra’s RFID solutions, click here.

Can Kiosks Improve Efficiency and Patient Care?

An article in kioskmarketplace.com cited a report that points to a trend toward growing use of self-service kiosks in healthcare.

The article quotes Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates, which recently released the 800-page report on leading trends in kiosks and interactive technology, as she discussed how patients could use a kiosk to check in at their doctor’s office: “‘ (Managed care provider) Kaiser Permanente has begun to roll this out in some offices. The patient swipes a card distributed by Kaiser and (the kiosk) brings up her information. It signs in for you.’ Mendelsohn said.”

The article continued: “Shifting to the electronic storing of patient information would reduce paperwork and eliminate many human input errors, says Mendelsohn. These factors, along with offering greater convenience to their patients, should convince healthcare providers to invest in kiosk check-in systems, she says.”

A similar application was described in this Boston-based article, which describes a kiosk under development this spring at Massachusetts General Hospital:

“The self-service kiosk promises to increase efficiency both inside and outside the physician office setting by gathering basic information from patients …  and directing that information to a physician prior to an office visit …. The kiosk … is part of the latest surge in health care technology aiming to increase efficiency in the health care system and the patient care process.”

Read the full article here. 

Other uses for kiosks in healthcare include touchscreen directories/wayfinding systems and staff training.

Do you foresee a place for self-service kiosks in your facility? Or are you already using them, and if so, for what purpose?

Learn more about kiosks and kiosk printing here.

Success Story – Positive patient ID: Bar coding at the bedside

“The FDA estimates that barcode-based bedside medication administration systems will prevent 500,000 adverse drug events over the next 20 years and reduce medication errors by 50%.”

With this statement in mind, we recently held a webinar and presented an excellent example of bar coding at the bedside. Charles Still from Southwest Vermont Medical Center explained how the hospital implemented bar coding and dramatically improved its patients safety record. He shared his experience about 2D bar coding, wristbanding, and reporting metrics.

We had great attendance and offer a recorded version of the webinar at this link:

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/resource/demand-positive-patient-id-bar-coding-success-bedside

Tags: wristband, healthcare, bar codes

Tamper-Resistant Medicaid Prescriptions: The Locking Printer

Last year, Zebra was challenged by one of our major healthcare partners to come up with a way to secure drug prescription printing. Aside from the cost of a printer, at issue was securing the media used to print the prescriptions. Zebra’s Development Services was called in and they came up with a modification to the G-Series printer that included:

• Locking lid to prevent that prevents access to media, reducing instances of unauthorized, improperly altered and counterfeit prescriptions or theft of media.
• Reinforced viewing window to prevent break ins and prevents the loss of revenue due to theft.
• Security cable slot to secure the printer to desk.
• Firmware that prevents feeding of blank media out of printer.

Locking G Series Printer

Locking peripherals are not new. In fact the locking G-Series used a standard Kensigton lock. But locking and protecting both printer and media is unique and has allowed hospitals to comply with the new Federal mandate on Medicaid prescriptions.

To watch a two-minute YouTube video on the customized locking G-Series solution, click here. To learn more about some of the exciting things Zebra Development Services is doing, click here.

125 Million Patient I.D. Wristbands

For over forty years, Zebra has been improving a broad variety of process performances by delivering industry solutions that enable our customers to deploy the right asset in the right in the right place at the right time.

This capability can result in anything from improving the speed of overnight package deliveries, decreasing manufacturing production errors, and though no one likes to get them, even improving the record quality of electronic traffic citations.

But no tracking metric has been more important to us than the improvement of patient safety through bar coded wristband printing.

According to the Institute of Medicine, more than 100,000 Americans die annually in U.S. hospitals because of avoidable medical errors – the eighth leading cause of death here in the states. That is higher than auto accidents or breast cancer.

Since the first bar coded wristband we printed in 1995, Zebra has been committed to patients and healthcare facilities by developing industry-leading thermal transfer technology that helps track patient and medication information with clearer, more reliable patient information.  Better usable information leads to fewer medication errors.

Patient safety begins at the wrist. It is the single point where a healthcare practioner makes sure that the right patient gets the right medication at the right time. That is why we are marking a significant milestone. This month Zebra will have sold one hundred and twenty five million wristbands around the world; more than 50 percent of those in the last 18 months. This increase can be directly tied to the adoption rate of bedside bar code medication administration which requires scanning a patient’s wristband and then scanning the medication before administering it to the patient.

But we are stopping at 125 million. We are continuing to incorporate new technologies that will make wristbands more comfortable, make them last longer, and even impervious to the print-fading results of hand sanitizers.

Hospitals around the world – from the Portiuncula Hospital in Ireland, to the Hospital Bandeirantes in Sao Palo to the Nebraska Medical Center here in the U.S. – are getting a clear and consistent reads on their patients’ wrists, using Zebra wristbands. This delivers the greatest process improvement of all: better patient safety.

To see more of Zebra’s patient safety solutions, click here.