Getting Connected - Hospital ID Cards No Longer Required
- October 2002
Soon, the days of a hospital card for each Niagara hospital will be gone in the Niagara Health System, as we standardize our computer information systems across all seven locations. It is all part of the NHS Information Systems plan to begin building the foundation for the electronic patient record in a connected organization.
It takes little imagination to understand the possibilities that an integrated system brings to the world of medical information. For patients, nurses, doctors and health care professionals, the wonders of an integrated system can make filing cabinets & shelves full of information available in an instant!
Until now, each hospital site has provided its own hospital card to patients. The card number is entered each time a patient is admitted for tests or inpatient care and demographic information such as name, mailing address, birthdate, next-of-kin is called up from a hospital database. As of mid-October, all that will change, as the NHS launches a new computer program, which will allow all seven locations to access the same database of patient demographic information.
"A lot of our patients do go to different hospitals within Niagara for their care," said Liz Meehan, Regional Manager, Registration, Scheduling & Switchboard. "They may come into one site for Emergency care, and go to another site for follow-up diagnostic tests. That means they have to keep track of a number of different hospital cards and update their demographic information at each site."
With the new system, those individual hospital cards will be eliminated. Instead, all patients will be required to bring is their Ontario Health Card, no matter what NHS site they visit. The Patient Registration staff will then do a quick check to make sure mailing address and phone number haven't changed. The new system will be implemented on October 16 at Douglas Memorial Site in Fort Erie, Port Colborne General Site, and Shaver & Niagara Rehab Site in St. Catharines. Over the next several months other NHS sites will also become integrated with the new database.
Ontario Health Cards must be valid and up-to-date ….
"The Ontario Health Card has a magnetic strip for scanning, so we are taking advantage of technology already available," said Ms Meehan. " This has really helped the NHS in our plans to integrate our sites."
The ADT program, which stands for Admission Discharge Transfer, will be accessible to authorized staff at all sites. Patient information will always be up-to-date, and the same questions will not have to be asked. The new system will provide an easy-to-read wrist band, which comes with a bar code, and will pave the way for improved patient identification.
Initially, patients will have their demographic information re-entered into the new system the first time they come to hospital after October 16. Currently, there are close to one million patient names in eight separate databases throughout the NHS, and a lot of duplication and out-of-date information exists. By the end of next summer, there will be one integrated database with approximately 500,000 patient names. Only authorized health care professionals and health records staff will have access to the information and a number of security checks will be in place within the software.
This new software paves the way for individual bar codes to be assigned to inpatients on a wrist band. In a few years, the NHS will be able to expand the technology to nursing units, and nursing staff will be equipped with a code-reader, to cross-check patient identity. This will improve patient safety relating to dispensing of medications, and other required treatments. As well, this is the first step on the way to a full electronic patient record.