Barcodes, O.R. Nurses and Changing Hospital Financial Health
Good grief, what do barcodes and nurses have to do with hospital financial health?
A lot. Stay with me here.
The operating room comprises about 60% of a hospital’s product spend, and nurses run the operating room. They dispense the implants, they open the surgical products, and they utilize most of the ancillary supplies that support a surgical procedure. If the OR was a retail store, nurses would be running the checkout.
Whatever is used during a surgical procedure must get reimbursed by insurance, in one way shape or form. Tracking what is used for reimbursement is called “charge capture”. Currently, some of what gets used (and reimbursed) during a surgery is manually keyed into a computer that keeps track of patient information. (Some stuff does not get tracked at all.) If we go back to the store analogy, the nurse would be punching the product number, the serial number, and the expiration date of products used manually into the register for each item used. That is a LOT of number punching.
Roughly 50 years ago, the retail industry figured something out that not only seismically changed retail but changed the lives of pretty much all of us as consumers. They sorted out the value of the simple barcode, and a concept called Point of Sale scanning. Scanning a good or item at the checkout was not only much faster and efficient, using the digitalized data that was collected completely transformed business efficiency. Retail came to understand and leverage the value of data, and all the good things that came from it (Wal-Mart did it better than anyone). And these benefits were passed on to consumers through lower prices and greater availability. Think of all the things you can buy on Amazon that show up the next day. That entire concept is enabled by good data. And good data starts with point-of-sale scanning.
Let’s revert to nurses, the operating room, and manual entry of product usage and data, and perform a thought exercise:
• The OR is by far the biggest product cost center for a hospital.
• The products used are being manually keyed into the computer, or not recorded at all.
• Hospitals are under financial duress.
Does anyone see a solution? Could all the benefits of point of sale/point of use scanning and good data that transformed retail work for the key profit center of a hospital - the operating room?
Simply put, hospital finances and operational efficiency suffer from cruddy and incomplete data from the operating room. And cruddy data comes from manual data entry (or non-entry) practice in the operating room. And the real root of that problem is that personal computer in the corner of the OR that runs the EHR patient record. It was designed to hold information, not capture information. It’s not a Point of Sale/Point of Use tool. It’s a fish riding a bicycle when it comes to data capture. Would you use a PC and a keyboard as a register at the front of a store?
Read more about the ScanTrakker at www.summate.net