The Polyclinic is a 100-year-old multi-site medical clinic serving the Seattle Washington area.
When the folks at The Polyclinic called regarding a barcode tracking system for their medical charts, they were not strangers to the concept. The Polyclinic has a full "IT" department and uses electronic medical records, but still have nearly one million paper charts stored in offsite warehousing. All of the charts were already barcoded, but the system they were using was replaced by a system that does not have the capability of using barcodes or tracking the current location of the charts.
About The Polyclinic
After our first conversation, it was obvious that Traverse was a perfect fit for The Polyclinic's needs, which had a few nuances that typically do not apply at single site implementations.
Traverse was designed to use barcodes to prevent typing errors. While Polyclinic does use the barcodes, one of the workflows requires users to find medical charts without the use of barcodes. This is because the charts are stored in offsite storage. Luckily, Traverse has powerful search capabilities.
The requirement was to allow a user to perform a lookup for a specific chart or charts and then to request delivery of the charts to a specific person at a specific location.
The new workflow at The Polyclinic is as follows:
- A person is notified to request chart(s) verbally or via email
- Locate the chart(s) in Traverse using Traverse's flexible search ability
- Select the chart(s) and perform a "Request" transaction in Traverse
- The "Request" transaction sends an SMS and or Email to the courier
- The chart is flagged as requested per the transaction
- Courier physically retrieves the chart(s) from the physical location
- Courier delivers them to the requested destination
- Charts are "Checked-Out" by scanning barcode to the destination / user
The biggest challenge at The Polyclinic was the number of charts and patients. Traverse is accommodating just about one million charts and the same number of patients at The Polyclinic. Looking up a chart by ID is sub-second, and searching by description using a partial name and date of birth takes only a few seconds.
Other items unique to The Polyclinic were assigning user / group permission via Active Directory, creating workflows for different groups, and importing data from several disparate systems.
One of the things we discovered while rolling Traverse into different medical offices is that many medical offices use Dymo printers for various labeling tasks.
Traverse can and does print barcode labels to Dymo printers, as well as Intermec, Zebra, SATO, Datamax, and others.
One of the major selling features of Traverse for this application is the ability to create custom notifications.
For example:
Given a library application in which all of the books are uniquely identified with barcodes and each patron of the library has a library card with their ID barcode on the card, when a patron checks a book out, Traverse can send an SMS or email or calendar entry to the patron with the return due date.
The Polyclinic was able to customize Traverse to look like a custom application built for them, including custom splash screen, The Polyclinic logo on the web pages and in the reports, notifications to the carriers, custom titles on pages and transactions, and omitting transactions from the screens that are not part of the workflow.
Since Traverse is capable of many concurrent users, and is browser based allowing access to anyone on the corporate network with proper active directory credentials and security clearance, the rollout was easy, even for more than 1,000 users.
Traverse has the ability to import and export data.
Sometimes, most times, companies do not have their data formatted the way Traverse needs it for importing. We offer as part of the sale a onetime import of existing data so that you do not need to worry about it.
Call today to schedule a live demonstration as to how Traverse can help save you time and money using barcodes.
You can also use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for added security. If you have ever noticed when you go to your bank's web site the URL is HTTPS instead of HTTP, the "S" is for secure and uses SSL. When SSL is used, the data transmission between your browser and the Web Server is encrypted.
This is just another measure to ensure
HIPAA 45 CFR 164.502(a)(1)(iii) compliance.
We are also sensitive to the average care facility's budget and have priced the software, training, and support in a very common sense manner.
Call us for a quote.
201-728-8809