Teamwork is a wonderful thing. We’ve been collaborating with the Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) to field a new capability that enables the electronic resulting of laboratory studies into a patient’s electronic medical record. This capability has been implemented at all hospitals in theater to reduce lab personnel workloads. The tool is already utilized in garrison-based hospitals, but it’s the first time it’s been added to the mix in theater.
The Bagram Craig Joint Theater Hospital (CJTH) and 325th Combat Support Hospital in Kuwait are already using it and this month, we fielded the solution to the 10th Combat Support Hospital (CSH) at Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan. Thus far, lab personnel at Dwyer have cut their manual entry for results by 75 percent!
This is being accomplished thanks to a capability that enables the lab equipment to communicate with TMIP Composite Health Care System (CHCS) Cache (TC2). With this new capability, lab personnel can automatically transfer order information to lab equipment and receive the results from the lab equipment into the TC2 application, eliminating dual entry.
A new hardware device and software solution provides a link to lab instruments with their MC4 system. Now when lab results for a patient come back, the system recognizes which patient record the data belongs to and automatically populates the EMR with the results.
For busy hospitals, this will help increase efficiency and patient safety. No longer will a lab technician have to manually enter all the lab results for each patient into their MC4 system. The new setup should also reduce patient data errors inherent with fat-fingering information into a system.
Laboratory personnel are also able to process large quantities of specimens safely, while reducing instances of lost or misplaced specimens thanks to a bar-coding, synoptic reporting and image management system. In one month alone, CJTH was able to process 6,924 tests.
Based on feedback coming in from the field, lab personnel are very excited about this new functionality. This streamlined process within the electronic health record (EHR) system is a wonderful thing and will eventually become standard for CSHs.