A New Approach to Bedside Registration –
Practical, Efficient and Patient-Centric

Speak of bedside registration and you’re likely to hear some negative reactions – “It’s cumbersome, it’s expensive, it’s not designed for efficiency.”  Those are the voices of early adopters – the registrars who traded their manual information-gathering process for what they had hoped would be a convenient, mobile solution.  However, as they quickly learned, the bulky workstation on wheels (WOW) was not so mobile in a congested ER or the cramped confines of a patient’s room. And even then, there was a certain amount of paper-shuffling that was required.

Seeing the shortcomings of these early approaches, Standard Register collaborated with Motion Computing to develop a better solution.  They married the power and portability of Motion Computing’s C5 Mobile Clinical Assistant with the efficiencies of Standard Register’s SMARTworks® Clinical Enterprise to create a paperless system that simplifies bedside registration and provides immediate access to patient information wherever it is needed.

A Simple, Patient-Friendly Process
SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise presents all of the necessary registration documents, including consent forms, electronically on the screen of the portable tablet for both the registrar and patient to complete. The application makes registration as simple as writing on paper.  The special “ink on glass” feature allows either person to add written comments anywhere on the electronic form. Whatever is written on the tablet screen will be captured as part of the document image.

With a built-in camera to capture patient pictures and scan patient ID, insurance card and other documents, the registrar never needs to leave the patient’s bedside.  Positive patient identification is established. Insurance information is captured. Everything that is written on screen or scanned, including images of documents, is transmitted to a document management system.  Immediately patient wristbands and labels can be generated, information retrieved or documents produced from any where in the hospital system.  

More Accurate, Complete Registration
This mobile application introduces a new level of accuracy.  The process is guided by a predetermined logic which is aligned with clinical criteria as well as the hospital’s business office.  As a result, the hospital can be assured that all of the necessary registration steps are completed, helping to avoid rework and insurance rejections.  At the same time, the application ensures patient documentation is properly matched to the right patient.  By eliminating the paper, the application reduces the human errors so common to manual processes.

Flexible and Efficient
It’s an efficient solution, ideally suited for bedside registration and a wide variety of other mobile applications, including social services and nursing.  Any form that’s needed can be electronically accessed and completed from the tablet. Moreover, information can be sent wherever it’s needed in the hospital or to an outside agency, specialty clinic or doctor’s office by fax, e-mail, or by printing and mailing the document.  All printed documents are bar coded to assure positive identification for the patient and facilitate scanning into HIS without manual indexing. 

For all its capability, SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise’s bedside registration application is cost-effective. The C5 Clinical Assistant is comparably priced to a high-end laptop computer. And the software quickly pays for itself with the efficiencies and cost savings it provides by moving hospitals to less paper-intensive processes.

For more information about bedside registration or other mobile computing applications for SMARTworks Clinical Enterprise, contact us today.