Improving the patient experience by enhancing patient safety is a priority for Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs), but ongoing identification errors continue to put patients at risk.

By adopting a consistent positive patient identification (PPID) process and implementing Zebra’s advanced barcode-based identification technology, ASCs can make significant progress toward streamlining workflows and reducing medical errors.

Learn How to Improve Your Patient Experience with Positive Patient Identification

From admission to discharge and everywhere in between, ASCs are focused on providing high-quality care and ensuring the safety of every patient. Unfortunately, the consistent and accurate identification of patients has long presented a challenge for healthcare organizations of all kinds. Why? Because in many places, the process of patient identification remains largely manual. As such, it is highly prone to errors and can lead to serious patient harm.

Most patient identification errors are the result of accidental mistakes, often caused by verbal and visual identification of patients or errors in transcription. All too often, a single misidentification can lead to serious issues as that inaccurate patient information is used in decision making throughout the patient journey. Automated patient identification systems are essential to correcting this long-standing problem and improving the health and well-being of patients as well as protecting the integrity of the healthcare system.

In its patient identification recommendations, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted this issue, indicating that “the failure to correctly identify patients continues to result in medication errors, testing errors, wrong person procedures.” The WHO prescribes the implementation of automated systems for patient identification.

The WHO recommendations led The Joint Commission to name patient identification accuracy as its highest priority in its patient safety goals. The Joint Commission continues to include patient identification accuracy as one of the requirements for accreditation of healthcare organizations in the United States. 

To learn how to improve the patient experience, with Positive Patient Identification, within your ASC, click here to download the white paper.