Monday, 28 May 2012

Surgery and Computerized Record-Keeping

By Allyson Westcot


The technology utilized in health care today, frequently in the form of tough computerized systems and notebooks, helps ensure patient safety in a more efficient and overall better manner than manual record-keeping ever could. The World Health Organization recently named some areas in which patient safety should to be improved. Panasonic rugged laptops can be utilised to do that.

The concept of inventory might sound more like a clerical job than one directly related to patient health and safety. But tracking the number and model of surgical tools utilized in the OR is a matter of patient safety, given that every year there are many cases of items being left inside patients.

While there are definitely cases where a clip or small object of some kind are sewn up within a patient without causing unpleasant effects, most cases will cause the patient discomfort, infections and disease. In some cases, these objects can also be deadly if not found and removed.

Counting the tools before, during and after an operation is a way to confirm this doesn't occur. Yet this method hasn't stopped cases of this happening over the years. Even the American College of Surgeons put out a study in 2008 that explained that counting was untrustworthy. With today's technology, there are new ways to inventory surgical instruments to make the chance of an object being left inside a patient exceedingly rare.

Rugged systems in the OR can now be used to trace surgical tools and sponges to be certain that the same ones are there at the end than were at the beginning. Radio frequency identification is used to scan all types of inventory to make sure that everything is outside of the patient following the operation. This technology is increasingly used to scan barcodes to ensure that info like patient identification, medicine identification and correct procedures are properly booked.




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