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E M R
D I A R Y
INTEROPERABILITY CAN BE ELUSIVE Community Hospital
in Grand Junction, Colo., has struggled getting its 3 electronic
records systems to talk to one another.
As I write this in
the middle of
Annette D. Saylor, RN, CNOR, CRNFA
October, our EMR
project is not where
I expected it to be.
Not even close.
We've accomplished
so much over the
past several months,
yet we're still not ready to go live, we're still not ready to be paperless
and we're still not ready to congratulate ourselves on a job well done
(and, well, done!). We're not stuck in neutral, but it sure feels as if
we're spinning our wheels. We're still troubleshooting our interfaces,
those computer bridges that let data move smoothly across our old
and new software platforms. The sorry truth is that we don't have a
single interface that works right every time.
Garbage in, garbage out
We've all heard the computer axiom, "garbage in, garbage out." We've
found out the hard way that human error in data entry impacts interface testing to the point that your tests can be worthless. Three of our
hospital's departments need to interface with our health information
system (HIS) during scheduling: the main OR, the outpatient surgery
center and the endoscopy center.
N O V E M B E R 2012 | O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E
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