Wythenshawe Hospital Adopts Scanning For Patient Care

Published 20th September 2007

September 19th, 2007, Watford, UK – Wythenshawe Hospital, the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, is using bar code scanners from Datalogic, a leading provider of general purpose and ruggedized handheld scanners and supplied by Kelgray, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of barcode, data collection and labelling solutions, to improve patient care and cut costs.

Wythenshawe Hospital has been using scanners for over two years, but only now are they proving their worth, following a change in the way patient records are managed. Now, nurses, medical secretaries and clinicians, using scanners connected to their PCs, can scan the bar codes on patient records, and this automatically brings up the patient’s electronic record, completely doing away with manual entering of details

Martin Hobson, IT Infrastructure Project Manager for Wythenshawe Hospital, added, “The old manual process was prone to error, which can cause problems further down the line. Now, we can track patients through their records on our Lorenzo IPM system right from the beginning until they are fully discharged.”

Until all patient health records & case notes are fully electronic all NHS trusts will need to utilize & track the current paper based system as efficiently as possible. We also use the scanners to manage the location & distribution of the paper based patient records around the trust. This prevents records being ‘mislaid’, therefore providing more efficient patient care.

Hobson continued, “We chose Datalogic because of their reputation and the resilience of the Gryphon Desk scanners. The scanners have worked without any problems at all.”

He added, “Datalogic and Kelgray did a great job supporting us with the programming of the scanners. We couldn't have done it without them. The scanner itself filters two different types of barcode so the information supplied to the application is correct. We would have had to manually re-label 10,000 patient records initially if this could not be done, and eventually over 250,000 if we had not had a viable bar coding solution. Relabelling would have cost a fortune, so the scanners have saved significant public money.”

Wythenshawe is one of the first hospital trusts to work in this way. Now, it is investigating ways in which the use of bar codes can be extended, to include patient wrist bands and blood, to improve tracking.

Charlie Trumpess, Marketing Manager, Datalogic Scanning, said, “The way that Wythenshawe are using our scanners shows that Barcode scanning can deliver almost unlimited benefits in the Health sector’’.