Unique Naming System Introduced In EMR Systems

03/19/2015 13:49

Recently, there was news regarding the release of a unique naming system in the EMR software that helps to prevent miscommunication at the neonatal intensive care unit in a hospital. According to reliable sources, the usage of such a unique technique reduced near miss wrong-patient orders in the EMR data. This is done by achieving better identification for babies in the NICUs.

Jason Adelman, patient security officer at Bronx hospital where this unique naming system was first employed states that, "Most hospitals in the country have a temporary name they use like Baby Boy or Baby Girl. That really increases the chances of confusing patient [charts]." Since a long time, confusion regarding the patient identity has been affecting the NICUs on a large scale and it can be said that the current advancement has come out as a relief for the authorities. The hospital has devised an advanced formula that enables to create a first name for unnamed babies using a number, the mother’s first name, the letter "s" and the baby's gender. Hence, using this technique along with the EMR software to generate the electronic medical record can be termed as the most advanced yet simple and effective method as of now.

Before the naming system was implemented, the number of errors found among 101,731 patients was 66. However, once the advanced technique was used along with the EMR software program, only 33 errors were found among the 98,513 patients, which is actually a phenomenal improvement. Thus, it can be said that using such an innovative method in the EMR systems can result in the overall improvement of the facilities provided to the patients in the healthcare organizations. Also, since the risk of getting errors gets minimized due to this unique naming system, the healthcare sector can also boom at a fast rate.

Jason Adelman also stated that, "We're submitting a grant to the NIH to study [whether] changing the children's names to a more distinct name will reduce patient errors." It can be said with utmost certainty that the accuracy of EMR using EMR software is being constantly improved in almost all aspects of healthcare. As mentioned earlier, this would only help in enhancing the overall facilities and care provided to the patients in the hospitals.

The unique naming system that has been utilized in the EMRs can be seen as a milestone in the healthcare sector, which will pave way to a more error-free and advanced method of digitalizing the data in the hospitals.