Tomorrow will be a bad,bad day!

elcue · Oct 16, 2006

Tess, I hope your day hasn't been really awful!

I've worked with computer systems in 3 ORs. One was good, the other 2 not so good. My current one is really, really awful! Very cumbersome.

That said, you do get used to it, and by the end of this week you will probably be doing fine with it, even though you won't necessarily like it!

Let us know how things turned out today

Linda

Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN · Oct 16, 2006

We were told that the schedule would be light for the first week until we're all on track with using the system. Yeah, right!!

We got told the same thing, we were also lied to. Of course, that wasn't remember at the last monthly meeting when someone brought it up ("A lighter schedule/ What do you mean?")

It took us about a month to get the kinks worked out. First, 26 computers going "live" on one floor at once, plus being 'wireless', over loaded the system. So we went back to having the computer tethered to the wall with 'ethernet' connection.

We also kept paper charting materials in the room, to grab if the computer acted up.

Aside from the online connection, the other problems we had were lock-ups, the charting taking 10 minutes for a 3 minute case (like ear tubes), and having to put additional things in the nursing notes section, because there wasn't an applicable field to put some thing in (which were later created).

As for the surgeons that whine, ask them if they would like a block of 'patience cheese'.

suzanne4, RN · Oct 16, 2006

Worst possible thing is for a facility to take the entire hospital live the same day. It should always be done in steps to get the bugs ironed out. There are always glitches that come up that were not expected, besides the ones that were, and the IT dept will not be able to handle everything at once.

Each unit should go up individually, or groups of units, like the critical care areas, the acute units, ER, OR, etc. each on their own. They each have different issues that need to be addressed.

Hope the GI lab has openings in their schedule for the management people that will need to be scoped secondary to ulcers.

Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN · Oct 16, 2006

Worst possible thing is for a facility to take the entire hospital live the same day. It should always be done in steps to get the bugs ironed out. There are always glitches that come up that were not expected, besides the ones that were, and the IT dept will not be able to handle everything at once.
Each unit should go up individually, or groups of units, like the critical care areas, the acute units, ER, OR, etc. each on their own. They each have different issues that need to be addressed.
Hope the GI lab has openings in their schedule for the management people that will need to be scoped secondary to ulcers.

I thought the OP said the floors had gone live already, and now the OR was having its turn.

ortess1971 · Oct 16, 2006

OK, here's how today went..They told us that the schedule would be light-when I left work at 3:30, there were 10 rooms running. I'm not kidding. No one thought to tell the patients about the computer situation so we had patients getting fed up and leaving. Actually, the OR staff did remarkably well with the computers, the pre-op area did not. It took 45 minutes in some cases to get the patient checked in. Only one doctor kind of whined about being caught in the "funnel" ie being made to wait to start his next case-the evening supervisor laughed in his face so that was fun to watch...I agree that they threw too much at us too soon-you should see the horror that is charging for items-half of which aren't in the system yet so you have to type it in yourself. Hopefully, things will calm down-I think the hospital really hit a sour note with the patients today though..

shodobe · Oct 17, 2006

I can do my charting in 1-2 minutes, usually less. We have been computer charting for about 5 years. We use meditech. It is not the best because it is written in old DOS programming and should be updated to a Windows type programming. It took us a while, about 2 weeks but after that we could never go back to paper charting, just tooooo slow. I work at another facility that uses paper and it is very cumberson. Just have paitience and you will like it hopefully.

RNMommy2 · Oct 18, 2006

We just started computers too. I find it takes about twice as long as paper charting. We are only allowed to be logged into one computer at a time so in order to work on two patients (such as in recovery) you have to exit out of about 5 screens in order to get to the screen where you can switch to the other patient. When checking vitals every 5 min we have not figured out a way to do this without having to catch up with the second one later. Major pain in the you know what!! So far I have been writing things down on scratch paper and filling it in later. Would love to have my paper back!!!!