Daily Portable Chest update

The new process for Daily Portable Chests has finally cleared all of the hurdles it needs to clear and is headed for the home stretch. The new process will be rolled out on December 9th.

The old workflow had the MD order ONE parent order that release an automatic new child order each day. This became problematic when one of the children needed to be canceled for any reason.

The new workflow will look like this...

• MD picks Daily chest off of the pref list
• This sends a communication to the Unit Clerk of the patient but does not actually send an order that can be viewed by Medical imaging
• The message will include info for the Unit clerk about when to begin and end ordering daily chest xrays
• Each day the unit clerk will refer to a list and place an individual order for each person who needs a daily chest xray
• When the xrays are no longer required the unit clerk will "complete" that original nursing communication and no further xrays will be ordered.
• These orders will look, feel and act just like every other IMG order in the system now. If you need to cancel an occurance of a daily chest, it will be as easy as cancelling any other IMG. The next day if the Unit Clerk needs to order another portable chest, they will do so.

This should make for a much cleaner workflow and be more accurate in terms of patients receiving the amount of xrays that was expected.

Thanks

CT Contrast Administration instructions

After much work, the process for CT techs to inform RN's how to administer contrast for CT exams will finally be changing as of Dec 9. In brief a potential patient safety issue was uncovered due to the current process for sending administration instructions.

Currently the instructions were sent to the RN when the ORDER for the CT was placed. The problem is, it is not always 100% accurate. If the instructions call for barium and a nursing communication is sent later by a tech that gastroview will be used, 2 seperate and conflicting messages are viewable in the KARDEX.

To resolve this a few changes will be made. Specific admin instructions will no longer be linked to the ORDER. Instead the message along with the order will read "Please refer to the MAR for adminstration instructions". Each tech will have a group of favorite contrasts saved which will have specific admin instructions. When the tech orders the contrast for the exam, the specific instructions will be viewable by the RN in the kardex and on the MAR. This way, a consistent message is retained throughout the patients record and there is less chance for confusion.

CT techs will be given instructions for saving their group of favorites, with appropriate admin instructions, early in December in preperation for this change on the 9th.

Thanks.

Run Time Errors: What you can do

A group of users recently began experiencing the dredded "run time" errors while attempting to log into hyperspace. After some investigation it appears that a cause of certain run time errors is varrying resolutions on workstations throughout departments. In the recently discovered case, the users often accessed a workstation which had a different monitor resolution setting from their normal workstation and each time they went from one to the other, it errored out.

To be specific, the item that the workstation could not "resolve" was the vertical line that seperates your tech work list and your schedule orders report. When this sliding line was adjusted to far to the right at the home workstation and the user logged off, the error would occur when they logged into workstation B. To solve this particular error, it is suggested that you keep that sliding line (between the tech work list and the schedule orders report) located centrally on your screen.

Until we can get consistency in resolutions from monitor to monitor, this will save you some trouble.

Thanks