Reference no: EM133492331

Case Study: Labeling patient lab specimens at beside is the EBP I chose this week. There are many technologies that support this practice in various ways. At my hospital, we have recently implemented a program called "MobiLab" which involves a printer in every ER room and an application on our iMobile work phones that connects to the printers. Specimens are collected at bedside, the app requires a scan of the patient label and verification of patient identifiers (Name, DOB, etc), the labels are printed at bedside and applied to the specimens, and then they are sent to the lab. The goal of this technology is to reduce time spent hand-labeling specimens, but more importantly to reduce errors where specimens are labeled with the incorrect patient's information. According to Sandhu, et. al (2017), lab labeling errors led to over 160,000 adverse events, eleven percent of all transfusion deaths, and increases in rejected samples. The goal of MobiLab technology at bedside is to reduce (or ideally eliminate) these errors as they are connected to lab specimen labeling. The challenges we struggle with in the ER is the pace of the care we're giving, and there are a few "glitches" yet to work out with this technology. We draw labs, then the printer has turned itself off, so we have to wait for it to turn back on. Then, we go to open the app, and it's logged us out again, so we have to log in. Then it sends repeated prompts that "draw list has been updated" that we can't skip, and the list of req's is confusing and jumbled. We can verify and re-verify time and again, but sometimes it just doesn't want to scan and verify the patient information. The benefits of the technology is that within the app we can see exactly which labs we need to draw, without having to open Meditech and search through the confusing order screen.

Question: I think reinforcing how to use the technology and trying to plan ahead before an admission by logging everything in are ways we can work around some of the issues we have.