High-tech home care introduced
Nurses, physical therapists and other employees at Fayette Home Care and Hospice are reaping the benefits of new state-of-the-art computer technology that is making patient care easier and more convenient.
Earlier this year, the agency, which is owned by the Uniontown Hospital, installed BeyondNow’s home health care software solutions. The information system is designed to connect all three facets of the home care business – clinical activities, billing/financial and management decisions. Kelly Onusko, and registered nurses and home care systems analyst, explained that the computer system is divided into two programs. Road Notes is a computer program that is used by nurses and physical therapists in patients’ homes. In the office, health-care employees operate Home Works, the program’s other component.
Instead of taking cumbersome patients’ records and charts with them, nurses and physical therapists now arrive at patients’ homes carrying a laptop computer, according to Vickie Leone, the agency’s executive director.
“It’s really convenient because all of the information that they (nurses and physical therapists) need is in the computer system,” Leone said. “Sometimes, patients question why the nurses are using a computer because it is a change, but I think the patients are starting to get used to the computer.”
Leone said the computer system is designed to help reduce the number of bad outcomes for home health care patients, which is tracked by the Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation (JCHA).
“In home health care, some of the biggest challenges and risks that could result in bad outcomes occur when patients are using oxygen in their homes,” Leone said. “Smoke detectors and fire extinguishers must be available in those homes in case something does go wrong. Fall and risk assessment also is a major factor in home health care. Special kinds of instructions for bed monitors also are needed.”
With the new computer system, Onusko said, employees “have everything right at their finger tips” that they need to manage patient care.
To operate the laptop computers, employees use a secure system that includes several passwords, as well as fingerprint technology, according to Onusko.
“This allows employees to have access to the computer system but to protect patient security at the same time,” Onusko said. “There are multiple layers of security. The actual database is called Road Notes. There are multiple layers of security to ensure that no one can get into the computer system.”
Eileen Dobbins, physical therapy liaison, said the computer system is convenient because therapists have easy and quick access to vital patient information, including blood pressure readings, heart rates, glucose levels and other statistics.
“Now, I have all of the information that the nurse has,” Dobbins said. “In the past, we only had the therapists’ notes, which impacted delivery to care. But now we can easily find out if a patient has an abnormal blood pressure reading that could impact the physical therapy that we are planning to do. It puts a safety net into the system.”
When the agency receives referrals for new patients, Leone said, the nurse records the medications that the patients are taking into the computer system.
“This computer system is wonderful because there is a drug education component to it,” Onusko said. “It gives the nurse and the therapist a drug education sheet just like you receive from the pharmacy when someone receives medication. This gives you information about the adverse reactions of the medications and how the different medications can interact with each other. It’s all right there – drug-to-drug and drug-to-disease information.”
When the nurses and therapists first began taking the laptop computers to patients’ homes earlier this year, Onusko said patients were informed about the changes. At first, some of the patients didn’t want the computer opened because they didn’t understand the system and how it worked.
“Some of the patients were unsure about it because it was something different, but they gradually began getting used to the changes,” Leone said.
However, Onusko said the majority of the patients greeted the new computer system with open arms and minds.
One of the patients who adjusted to the new computer system quickly was 72-year-old William Santor of 65 Eggleston St., Uniontown. Santor developed an infection from a shoulder prosthesis. Doctors removed the shoulder prosthesis and then placed him on intravenous antibiotics in his home until the infection healed.
“I think the first time they came to my home the nurses had to do a lot of paperwork, but then they began using the computer,” Santor said. “The computer was must faster and really neat. They just punched the computer, and I thought it worked really well.”
The new computer system hasn’t reduced the amount of time that nurses and physical therapists spend in patients’ homes, according to Leone. Visits still normally take anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour.
“But it does allow the home office to be in touch with all of the billing functions because they no longer have to wait for pieces of paper to come in,” Leone said. “Now, the home office is very much up to date and current. It expedites the flow of information to the home base.”
In the past, Dobbins said she would have to wait as long as a week to receive doctors’ instructions for patients, but that is no longer the case because many of the doctors are connected to the computer system.
“The doctors love it because they are already on a computer system in their offices,” Dobbins said. “If the doctors decide to make a change in a patient’s plan of care, we know exactly what’s going on. There is no longer a delay.”
Leone explained that patients are discharged from the hospital with the same computer system.
“They are looking for interfaces,” Leone said. “There is no reason why our staff has to ask the same questions to patients over and over again because that information should be available in the computer system.”