We're a children's hospital in the process of building Epic/Beaker/WellSky (Mediware HCLL) with Go-Live set for April 2020.  We've bumped into a huge problem with Epic stating that our outpatient drawing area must use their Epic/Beaker outpatient product which does not allow for electronic (scanned) patient/sample ID and there will also be no patient ID bands.  We've been using electronic ID of patients and samples with our current system (MediTech), so losing this functionality would be taking a major step backwards for us - especially with our Pre-Op patients and their blood bank specimens. We don't want to have to go back to requiring 2 specimens collected at different times on all first time blood bank patients, and using no ID bands just sends up giant red flags to me as far as patient safety is concerned.  Is anyone else experiencing "no ID bands and no scanning verification of ID band vs. specimen label" in their outpatient areas?  How are you dealing with this?  I'm hoping that I can get some advice from all of you Epic/Beaker users.   Thank you so much!

We are on Epic and that is one of the reasons that we have continued to use a separate blood bank banding system.  Outpatient transfusions cause the same problems.  Beyond that it matters greatly whether you have good institutional compliance with the electronic Epic ID scanning for inpatients.  We also draw a second blood type confirmation tube on new patients.  For small children we may just give them group O blood the first time but that is a quite rare event for us which would be quite common for you.