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have nice handwriting."
On average, some systems claim they can save 20 minutes of nursing time per patient admission, which can amount to hundreds of hours per year. Ms. Pochman says her nurses spend half the time they used to on pre-surgical phone calls. "We allocated those hours to other areas and we schedule differently," she says. "It's streamlined the whole process."
Access to better information
The No. 1 benefit of online patient histories? It's a tossup. Some say saving nurses and patients time and aggravation. Others say it's having access to better medical histories. Having comprehensive histories in
advance of a procedure not only significantly speeds the pre-op process. It also reduces day-of-surgery cancellations. "It's bad for everyone when you have to cancel a surgery because of a medical problem you didn't know about," says Dr. Lennon.
When her nurses log in to review health histories, Ms. Pochman says they can bring a red flag to the attention of anesthesia. If additional tests or reviews are warranted, such as a blood pressure patient who needs to be seen by his primary care physician before surgery, they can get that taken care of before the patient is placed on the schedule, instead of
cancelling the case when the problem is discovered on the day of surgery. Imagine giving legible health
histories, all right there on a single piece of paper, a leisurely review instead of frantically chasing them down on the day
InstaPoll
Can your patients register online?
Yes, we use a pre-op screening website. 21%
Yes, we created a screening form patients can download from our website. 3%
No. 76%
SOURCE: Outpatient Surgery Magazine InstaPoll, n=79
