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The very first day, this program was worth every penny of it.
All of a sudden we saw all of these brown rooms and we said, "Those are all dirty beds
and how come those aren't being cleaned?" We knew that we were waiting on beds being
cleaned, but the visual of Teletracking showing us all of those dirty beds at the same time.
We immediately regrouped with EVS to come up with a better plan to clean in the afternoon.
That was our huge eye-opener. We knew that we had bad cleaning issues, but
we didn't realize that we had dirty beds at one time that were unclean.
Our capacity issues have been, to us, it seems extreme.
I can't imagine trying to keep track of 60 people who are looking for a bed at 8 o'clock
in the morning without having the automated Teletracking system and being able to know
where they are exactly in the hospital. It was very chaotic at the site and there
were a lot of police officers at the site in their cars waiting for ambulances to come.
The police officers loaded up their cars and they brought 22 patients to our hospital via
police car. And they all showed up in the ambulance bay
and the staff went running out with gurneys to put their patients on there.
It was very chaotic in the beginning because there were so many people in the E.D. at that
time. I was called at 2 o'clock and came in at 2:30
and by that time they had a plan in place of what was needing to happen and how many
critical patients needed to go to the O.R. and how many I.C.U. beds we needed to create.
Teletracking helped us, enabled us, to move it on screen so that we could keep track of
who the patients were and put it in a spreadsheet and send it off to the City.
And that's what we used for weeks on end to keep track of these patients while they were
here. The fact Teletracking allowed us to identify
who the patients were was huge. Because I had the whole patient profile in
there it allowed me to know what was going on with that patient and when that patient's
diagnosis changed, when the care of that patient changed, we were able to track that, too.
Care delivery using both Epic and Teletracking has been improved because we're able to track
those patients in the hospital easier. The preplanning that Teletracking allows us
to have is critical. The staff have gotten very comfortable using
both Epic and Teletracking to keep us informed of what's going on in their unit.
We had some serious issues in the beginning because we didn't really know how to use both
systems. And we put out the "I Need Help" Flyer and
Teletracking came to our rescue big-time. We could not have done it without the Teletracking
Support. Teletracking Support has been available 24/7
for us. Everyone we talk to at Teletracking when we
need help has been absolutely positive and very supportive.
And when they tell me that it's because I didn't click this, I clicked that, and I feel
like, "Oh, I shouldn't have bothered with a call," they say, "No, that's why we're here."
I like the custom reporting. We've captured a lot of data related to discharge
time of day, the census time of day. We were collecting data because we wanted
to find out how come on certain days our O.R.s were busier than another day.
So we collected the average admissions from the O.R. versus the Access and then versus
Emergency Department day by day and almost hour by hour, so we could track what we were
doing. Where our patients were all coming from at
any time of day, and it helped the O.R. then go back and rework their schedule so not in
all one day would we get 18 orthopedic admissions, they would spread them out.
The OR has, they looked at our numbers and saw that we were very lean on a Wednesday
and very heavy on a Thursday and very light on a Friday so then they branched it out and
they said to orthopedics in particular, "you can have days Monday, Tuesday and Friday"
and so their people are coming and going as they recover from their surgeries in a timely
manner.