Point-of-Care

Your agency lives and breathes to care for its patients. Patient data is its lifeblood. How your agency handles patient data often makes the difference between your success and failure. It determines how completely you understand your patient’s needs, how quickly you respond to adverse events, and even how much you will be paid. That’s why agencies like yours are moving quickly to incorporate point-of-care into their operations.

The premise behind capturing patient data at the point-of-care is simple. Capture all relevant data, capture it only once, get this data into the central database as soon as possible, and allow everyone access to the data whenever needed. While the premise is simple, how it is accomplished makes a tremendous difference.

Typically, point-of-care systems have been designed as an extension of an agency’s back office management system. This approach attempts to turn clinicians into data entry clerks. It doesn’t work. Clinicians have unique needs that are not addressed when you approach point-of-care from a data-system-only perspective. We approached the design of Patron’s point-of-care module from a very different perspective.

Our system was designed around your care professionals. We then seamlessly wove their functions into the fabric of Patron’s back office. As a result, your clinicians will see it as a natural extension of their usual procedures and will understand how it benefits them in their work from the first day.

We have a better way to do pathways

We have created a better approach to clinical pathways in Patron's point-of-care module. Traditional clinical pathways have several fatal flaws. They are one-size-fits-all in terms of patient care. While pathways can adequately address patients with a single ailment, they have never been able to sufficiently address co-morbidities. Thus, traditional pathways don't allow your clinicians to personally assess the appropriate care for each patient.

While most nursing directors readily admit to the limitations of traditional pathways, they feel that pathways still serve an important need. When asked what they liked about pathways, here’s what they said:

• Consistency of Care–“We have developed policies that set us apart from other agencies. Pathways help us enforce that standard of care.”
• Best Practices–“We can’t specialize in everything. Pathways serve as a guide for clinically proven acceptable practices.”

Our challenge was to keep the beneficial aspects of pathways and discard the characteristics that didn’t work. Here is how we did it.

We broke pathways into their smallest components– tasks. Patron stores all potential clinical and therapeutic tasks. It determines which tasks are appropriate to your patient from the information in the system. It then offers these tasks to your clinicians for approval. Your professionals can choose their own path, at bedside, from the tasks suggested— all within the limits set by your agency.

 

Our pathways work like you do

We determine appropriate pathway tasks from every assessment item. Traditional pathways attempt to understand the patient’s needs by looking at the diagnosis. Patron looks at every assessment item to gather a much more complete picture of your patient’s needs. Here is how this works:

In the course of assessing the patient, you “tell” the Patron system literally hundreds of bits of information that can be used to determine the path of care. Patron examines all of the patient data and “triggers” tasks that your clinicians can accept or decline. Patron does what it does best: keeping track of information. Your clinicians do what they do best: making clinical judgments on what care is appropriate.

We keep it simple. As you can imagine, when you determine tasks by examining everything that the system knows about a patient, the options quickly become overwhelming. Patron steps in and keeps your clinician’s task list simple by eliminating duplicate tasks and presenting options in the proper perspective. Clinicians have told us that it works like an extension of their memory, “It’s like a to-do list that is kept running in the background and updated automatically."