We are in the process of building Cerner Millennium Blood Bank. We noticed that emergency unit tags cannot be printed until after you dispense the unit. Currently, we have nursing staff who pick up the units read back to us prior to accepting the dispense in the computer. Does anyone have a good work around for this? We want consistency between regular issues and emergency release.

Thanks

We have used Cerner Millennium since April 2004 and to date, I have not found a way around this. We do have blank emergency tags printed, but those would have to be filled in manually by hand and we prefer not to go this route. So, when we need to emergency release we just have to move quickly and use the time while the printer is printing to pull off our segs and anything else such as that that we need to do. It actually goes pretty quickly, but when it is an emergency it seems like it takes printers forever to print out what you need!

If you are actually dispensing them at the time, there may only be a few minutes differnce between the printing and the physical dispensing.

The other option is to return them and redispense with the actiual time and courier information.

We have an Icon to "Generate Tags and Labes". In this section you can check the box that says "Emergency Tag" you can either assign it to a specific patient (with a MR# on file) or free text a patien't name.. John Doe. This function gives you all the cautionary info for the doctor to sign on the bagtag. we have also gone through this function to print out blank emergency release tags that are ready for us to fill out by hand, but we tend to only use these during downtime emergencies.