Our hospital has begun using technology that transfers vital signs directly from the vital signs monitor to our Meditech electronic medical record.  This has eliminated the manual documention of vital signs which was a great quality improvement.

 

Nursing also uses the Meditech Transfusion Administration Record (TAR) to document transfusions.  Our problem is that the vital signs are not able to be downloaded into the TAR.  They only are able to be sent to one location in the Patient Care Documentation (PCD) location.  Our only option is to have nursing manually copy the vitals from the PCD into TAR.  Understandly, this is a huge dissatifier to the nursing staff and opens the door to errors as well.

 

We have already check with the vendor for the vital signs instrument.  They can only send data to one interface so there is no option to have the vitals sent to an alternate location. A proposal has been made to stop documenting the vitals in TAR and the expectation is that anyone looking for transfusion vitals would have to go to the PCD and figure out what vitals belong to the transfusion.  Has anyone run into this problem and were you able to resolve it?

 

 

Wow! We are supposed to start TAR next month and that looks like a big issue! Who does the transfusion audits at your hospital? Right now we (blood bank) are doing them and I do not want to have to look all through the medical record to find the right vitals!

Thanks for the heads up! If I get an answer from our IT person for a solution, I'll post it.

Thanks!  The blood bank is currently doing the audits for the transfusion.  If this goes through, we may be asking nursing to perform the audits.

I was told that nursing will be entering all the vitals into TAR. I know that is not a solution for you, but it will make things easier for us.