Our staff has noticed that in the operating rooms, when the procedure is finished, they take the patient to the recovery area and frequently leave the oxygen running at maximum on the anesthesia machine.  Some of these machines are left running all night (as evidenced by finding them going on weekends when no cases were done).  Not only does this waste gas, but creates a potential fire safety problem if the oxygen accumulates around anything combustible.

There are too many medical record numbers the same individuals.  Also the same medical record number may apply to individuals not belonging to that medical record number. I request files for my doctors and nurses and look up patient info for verification for reports or to request files and many times when I enter the number, more than one name appears. The other name/names are clearly not the patient I am requesting. Not only does this pose an issue with patient care, i.e.

This idea will attempt to address readmission to the hospital by identifying which patients are at high risk for readmission before they leave the hospital or before they are transferred from an ICU to a step down unit. The hypothesis for this idea is that if we are able to calculate a risk score for readmission and intervene early for those patients with a high risk score either before the patient leaves the hospital and after they are discharged from the hospital or ICU unit, the rate of readmission will go down with more targeted interventions.

The following is for SFGH specifically. As a family medicine resident, I am in the unique position of acting as an OB gyn, pediatrics, emergency medicine, and, of course, family medicine resident. Because of this I am exposed to learning various different electronic medical records which do not always talk to each other that well(LCR, ECW, watchchild, pulsecheck). Each department uses the system in a different way - pediatrics uses ECW and sometimes LCR, the ob department uses watchchild and LCR.