DOI: 10.5176/2251-3833_GHC17.37
Authors: Min-Chi Liao, Chu-Nien Chen, I-Chun Lin
Abstract: every patient during a hospital stay consumes a miscellany of medical materials. The responsibilities of noting down every item and its corresponding charge, then updating patients’ billing accounts fall on the nurses and the clerks. From hand-written records to accounting, the charging process is as time-consuming as it is prone to human errors. Inadvertent omissions not only contribute to erratic records, but also lost revenues and accounts management headaches that often require more administrative work and costs. To address the issue of charging, the development of the system saw the joint effort of the nursing and information departments of the case hospital and implemented to reach all nursing workstations in November 2015. This research collected data from 134 users to assess the performance of the IT intervention in inpatient medical materials charging. The results showed that the system was able to save the nurses an average of 11.2±2.6 minutes spent on manual recording all costs per shift, whereas saving the clerks 84.3±37.5 minutes updating patients’ accounts by keying in all the new numbers. In addition to saving time, the accuracy rate of accounting rose to 95.1{6e6090cdd558c53a8bc18225ef4499fead9160abd3419ad4f137e902b483c465}, translating to an increase of 1,354,549 NTD per month. The new system proved to benefit its target users with a simplified and efficient workflow that saves time and enhances accuracy. It helped cut down the billing paperwork the nursing staff had to deal with, reduce their administrative workload, and enable them to invest more time and energy on direct patient care. The case hospital’s success in IT implementation creates a win-win situation for both the organization and its staffer, and moreover paves the way for introducing more technologies to enhance the quality of nursing care.
Keywords: performance evaluation, IT intervention, Medical materials charging
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