|
Week 14: FirstNet and the Tracking Board
Special guest for this week. Darshan Thota has been gracious enough to put together a quick piece on the tracking board for FirstNet. Much of the patient documentation happens in the mpage (from last week), but in order to optimize the care delivery in an emergent setting they have some great tools to assist them. Since he is a Navy ER doc with a ton of experience, I thought I’d let him talk about his experience in the tracking shell this week!
FIRSTNET TRACKING BOARD
FirstNet is a platform to deliver care in the emergency department in MHS Genesis. It can also be used by the urgent care. Its primary purpose is to act an added layer of visualization of patients, lab/rad/EKG/consults in the ED. It’s used primary to enter orders, communicate with nurses and tracking the ancillary result status of the workup. FirstNet also allows to track consultation from services as well as visually show when admission has been determined by changing the icon on the tracking board. FirstNet is a dramatic improvement over Essentris for Input, Throughput and output
The ED Launchpoint is the main feature of FirstNet. It allows physicians a one stop shop to understand the input, throughout, and output of the emergency departments. Pit docs can see the number of patients seen that day, the number that they have seen individually, the avg LOS and the number in the wait quickly on the banner bar. This can help with resource utilization (calling in more staff in needed) and managing throughput (opening up more pods/beds).
ED Launchpoint also gives the lab/rad status of your patient. This is new compared to Essentris. You tell if a lab has been collected, is in lab, is processing and when the result is finalized you can view it by simply clicking on the lab icon. Radiology results work similarly where you can see if the study has been shot, completed, dictated or resulted. You can also get the final reads in FirstNet as well by clicking the icon on the tracking board.
Meds can quickly be ordered from a default Quick pics list or by setting up custom favorites. This rapidly improves the process of care by allowing al a carte selection of orders with a single mouse click. EKG’s can also be quickly ordered or re-ordered from the tracking board as well.
The length of stay also has color coded indicators to indicate length of stay >4 hours (yellow) or 6 hours (red). This can help track in patient consultant accountability for timely evaluations and dispositions.
Despite some initial growing pains, Firstnet (and especially the tracking board) has been one of the easier transitions for the staff to undertake. It has also caused similar workflow changes that we have seen in other care areas (such as the need for more mobile computing solutions) and requires some re-thinking of how we “used to do” things.
Next Week: Message Center
GENESIS 101: COVID-19 provided some avenues for pushing forward into previously uncharted territory. Last week the first E-Visit was built and deployed which allowed patients to answer some standardized questions which are directly delivered to the healthcare team. It is a great way to have a standardized “visit” and streamlines the patient communication process |
