Where Is Our Humanity?!?! Visitor Check-In
Do we truly have a patient-first approach?
You get the call. It is a call that no one wants to get. Your father is in the hospital. You are frantically searching for flights and emailing your boss saying that you will be out of town for a family emergency.
You grab a ride to the airport and your phone is lighting up with notifications. You can’t get a hold of anyone. You don’t have any idea what is going on. And now you have a five-hour flight. Every worst-case scenario is racing through your mind.
Will they be alive when I get there?
Will they be able to walk?
Will my kids be okay at home without me?
Did I unplug everything at home?
I have this massive deadline at work how will I be able to meet it?
After the fact it is easy to say that you are being irrational but at that time rational thought is usually tossed out the window.
You finally landed and you are on your way to the hospital. You call your sibling and get the room number, which isn't an update.
“Dad is doing better, but we are waiting for the doctor to come and give us an update.”
Now you are at the hospital and you are shuttled into a check-in line. 15 minutes later you get to the desk and you give them the patient’s name and room number.
click…clack…click…click
They ask you for your name.
click…click…clack…clack…click
Then they tell you. “I am sorry we don’t see you on the list of guests. They already have the maximum amount of people on the list.”
Then they hand you a number to call for further assistance.
At this point, you are just confused, angry, and distraught and frantically start calling this number for it only keeps ringing. You hang up and hit redial hoping that this time you will achieve a different result. No luck. Now you call your sibling in the room crying asking them “what the f@#! is going on!?”
They are equally as confused as it is only them in the room right now. They start trying to find someone that can help with this situation.
An hour has gone by since you received that number from the front desk. No one is helping you. You feel alone. At this point, you are thinking about how far you can get if you make a break for it. You're sizing up the security guard.
Eventually, they figure it out. and you get back in line that has now doubled since you got there. 45 minutes later you get back to the desk where it all started. You give them all the information again and you are praying that you are on the list now.
They give you your badge and you are off to the races. Then you realize you have no idea where you are going and ask the security guard on your way up thinking I could have made it past them.
How many of you can relate to that story?
Since the pandemic, many hospitals have clamped down on the number of visitors that can see the patient. I am not here to argue this but some of the rules are just downright stupid. One hospital I know only allows four people max per stay! Not four people at a time. Four…people…total. That is not even enough people for my immediate family.
So, during a stressful time, you are making the family choose who are the only people allowed to see them the entire time they are there.
I am sorry that is [insert choice words]!!!!
What does this have to do with digital health Zain?
Bear with me I am about to bring it all together
To me, we have to take care of the patient and their families. We can’t just pick and choose one or the other.
Did you know that there are smart locks for your home that allow you to give someone access for a period of time from hours to days? This is usually used when you have guests or a contractor working at your house. To top it all off it is super simple. You just need the person's email or phone number and add them with permissions and the designated time. Done and anytime they use their unique code or QR code you are notified.
Why can’t we have this in healthcare with visitors? Create an online check-in system where a designated family member can add and subtract guests whenever they want. You can even make it mandatory to enter the hours that the guest will be there with a picture of them if you want more security. Then the visitor gets a message with a code or a QR code that they can enter and/or scan and are off to the races. You can deploy your staff to other places, instead of the firing line which is the visitor's check-in desk.
Imagine if a system like this existed in the story above. It could have saved them precious hours and unneeded stress! Which can be the difference between being able to say goodbye and a loved one dying alone.
Before people come for me. I will go over some of the flaws of this system.
A system like this could increase the security risk to the hospital. But to that, I say before the pandemic we had people walking in and out at will. The most places had visitors do was sign in on a log. No IDs were checked in many cases.
Another problem I could see is the nursing staff of the patient being overwhelmed with family.
I come from a South Asian background and in our culture, if someone is seriously sick in the hospital you go visit them. Regardless of whether they are family or not. It is about community. When my grandfather was in the hospital during his last days they had to move him into a bigger room because of the number of people that were in there to visit. One of our family friends was in the ICU and the waiting room was a friends and family get-together with food and conversations. Both times we were respectful of the staff's wishes. But, some people are not. So I understand. I have been on both sides of the glass. This is why I would say you limit the number of guests. Make it 2 at a time as long as you make it easy for the visitors to make the exchange. You can take your staff out of the equation with a system like this. Make the door only unlock if the code lets them in. Just like their version of the badge.
To me, those are not game-breaking issues. And in most cases, those are issues we have already dealt with to some capacity. I am not saying that we do not evolve and move forward based on newly gathered facts. But we should not do it at the cost of people's humanity.
Progress without humanity is not true progress.
Every week I share a random fact about myself. This week’s fact is…
Random fact about me: I had a 1986 Volvo 240 which I still regret selling.
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