job griping.

So. I regularly work with our intake team. Intake's job is to receive documents from doctors, interpret them, upload them into our system, and create any orders related to them. Pretty straightforward. Well, I've had an awful lot of issues where orders are coming in wrong, in some way, shape, or form. Wrong name, phone number, address, hell, even sometimes I get orders for wrong equipment. The order says one thing, they put in another thing. It really ticked me off! I tried everything I could. I fixed the orders. I told my bosses. I didn't fix the orders. I told my bosses. I kept track of every little error in an order I came across. Nothing worked. It came to a head when our document management program was down, and I couldn't make sure that the orders were correct. I felt like an idiot, calling our patients not even knowing what their doctor had sent. Finally, Friday, my boss said "We're talking with intake today." And I praised the lord. My nightmare was over.

Ha.

My company works with respiratory equipment. Most of our equipment is not life sustaining, it just makes people's lives a bit better. CPAP mostly. There's one piece of equipment that we work with, however, that is life sustaining: a ventilator. most ventilators that we supply are under the name Trilogy (though we also now work with another brand that makes the Astral). Because vents are life sustaining, those orders go to a special person who does them lickety split.

So I'm working an order this morning, fixing the usual errors. This was put in on Monday, after the talk with intake. The usual, missing doctors, unchecked insurance, etc.. I'm looking at the actual order note and I say, "Hmm. That doesn't look like a usual CPAP script. Inhalation pressure? Exhalation pressure? Maybe it's a BIPAP (which has inhale and exhale pressures). Let me look at the script." Now mind you our computer system is throwing a hissy fit so the whole thing is moving as slow as molasses, but I finally load the script.

Right on the front, it says "Trilogy" in two different places.

So this order for a ventilator was sitting in my name since Monday (I work oldest to newest), marked as a CPAP machine, when it should be a ventilator. A patient with ALS has been without life-sustaining equipment for two days, because this person in Intake put it in as a regular CPAP.

I'm mad.