GAME-CHANGER How much time and hassle might your facility save?

Change may be challenging, but automation can save your facility time, money and hassles. Here are 5 areas where readers who've made technology leaps would never consider going back:

1. Infection Control Reporting
How much time can you save by moving information that used to be stored in boxes and binders onto your computers? Yenara Reda, RN, BSN, the OR team leader in charge of infection prevention at the Rockland and Bergen Surgery Center in Montvale, N.J., shakes her head when she thinks back to what it was like preparing quarterly infection-control reports before she automated the process.

"It could take me a full day to do a report covering 3 months' worth of patients," she says. "I'd be going back and forth, getting out all the files I needed, looking for this, looking for that. And if I was working after everyone left, I couldn't get everything I needed, because some information was locked away."

And now?

"Now it's a matter of 8 or 10 minutes to do the whole report, and it's more accurate," says Ms. Reda. "All the information I need is right there."

2. Online Registration
How much easier is pre-registration when you use one of several systems now available? "I had one patient tell me she preregistered for her procedure while she was in Wal-Mart shopping," says Brett Hawkins, MBA, facility administrator at the Meridian (Miss.) Surgery Center. "Patients tell us they love it."

Chances are your patients won't be the only ones who love it. "The information we get now is more pertinent," says Mr. Hawkins. "We're getting more legible, more complete medical histories, and that makes it easier to look for red flags. It's allowed us to reprocess toward more patient care rather than paper pushing."

And what if your patients can't or don't want to preregister online (or in line at Wal-Mart)? "We give them iPads when they come in," says Mr. Hawkins. "It's all digital and it takes about 12 minutes to pre-register, whether they do it online or here. Before, it took 35 or 40 minutes, because we had to go through everything, and sometimes we couldn't read what people had written. It's definitely a game-changer."

3. Payroll
Automation can take most of the headaches out of the process. Upgraded payroll software saves Nancy Logan, RN, CNOR, the OR coordinator at Atlantic Health in Morristown, N.J., about an hour every time she does payroll every 2 weeks.

"Now I can just pull up a calendar, click on the right month, mark off the whole week and everything is calculated immediately," she says. "Or sometimes people forget to swipe in their badges when they get to work or they forget to swipe out when they leave. Now, when I log on, there's a red bar on the screen that warns me if someone has forgotten to swipe in or out."

4. Order Facilitating
If your facility is struggling to keep up with the large number of faxes that arrive daily — or worse, occasionally misplacing them — listen to Tammy Killen, RN, MSN, the ambulatory care services director at SkyRidge Medical Center in Cleveland, Tenn.

"Orders would come in from doctors' offices and they might go to any of 4 or 5 different departments — any department that happened to have a fax machine," she says. "They were constantly getting lost, or not getting to the right person. It was a big mess."

Now, thanks to ordering software, all faxes go to 1 number, and 1 number only, and they're all stored as scans in a computerized queue. "So we can print them out or just look at them on the screen," says Ms. Killen. "If we do print something out and it gets lost, we can just print it out again. It's like a gatekeeper for all faxes that come into the facility."

That's a nice break for people sending the faxes, too. "We no longer hear: 'I already faxed it once' or 'How many places do I have to fax it to?'" says Ms. Killen. "And if a fax isn't in the queue, we know it hasn't come in, so we don't waste time looking for it."

5. Inventory
You'd expect to save time when you automate tasks that used to be done by hand, but you may find unexpected benefits, too. For Glee Myers, GI/CS tech, inventory, at the Wamego Health Center in Wamego, Kan., there were additional pleasant surprises when the center automated its inventory process via Horizon Medical International.

"The system flags me if any item is unavailable," she says. "There was no way to know that before. And it's also opened my eyes to what's out there in terms of other products. Sometimes I see things online that are more suitable to our needs — things I would not have known about otherwise."

Ms. Myers recalls having to fill everything out by hand — a chore that normally took well over an hour to complete. And now? "Now I can order everything we need in 10 minutes and have it within 24 hours," she says.