Hospital Visitor Handling 101
How to handle hospital visitors is a top question for the healthcare industry today. There are new expectations not only for visitors but for hospital employees as well. Most COVID suggestions like frequent handwashing and covering your cough are common knowledge, but hospitals are a sensitive environment and require a more rigorous follow-through. The CDC suggests hospitals display new posters with COVID information and schedule visitors for a brief training session before their visit occurs.
Capacity Management for Visitors
Tracking how many visitors are on the property prevents your hospital from overcrowding. It also provides an easy way to maintain the 1 visitor per patient that is now standard at most hospitals. A manual paper process will more time consuming and increase the chance of errors. BreezN, our visitor management software, features a dashboard that shows how many visitors are currently on location. If you see you’ve reached 40 current visitors and your max at any given time is 40, you can reschedule visitors to come back at a later time or date.
The dashboard can also create a custom view based on the information you gather from each visitor. For instance, you can associate a visitor with a room number to ensure there is only one visitor at a time in that room. If someone is currently visiting a patient in room 506, you can deny access to another visitor at the front desk trying to visit the same room.
Visitor Education Before Visit
If a pre-registered visitor is planning to visit at 3:30, you could ask them to arrive 10 minutes early to do some COVID screening and training. Or if they’re a walk-up visitor, you can review the COVID screening and training before completing the check-in process. Our software allows you to create custom pre-screening questions that are tailored to COVID concerns:
– Have you recently been in contact with a COVID positive person?
– Have you experienced any COVID related symptoms in the last 14 days?
These questions are associated with smart-workflows, so based on the visitor’s answer, the visitor can be approved on denied. After the questionnaire, the hospital staff can provide a brief training session on visitor best practices:
Who the visitor should notify if they begin to experience COVID symptoms
How to perform proper handwashing
How to properly wear a mask
Make them aware of hand sanitizer stations
The correct way to cover a cough
How to use their visitor badge to check-out at the end of their visit
Handle Patient Visits with Ease
Change can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be challenging or overwhelming. With the new guidelines in place, the next step is to implement them. While many hospitals are already working to adjust to the new visitor protocols in their hospitals, now it’s time to simplify this process. Visitor management is a digital way to check-in visitors on at an iPad kiosk station. It comes equipped with pre-registration, pre-screening, real-time analytics, and visitor check-out options. This software makes the handling and management of visitors safe and easy.
COVID threw a wrench in all of our plans and procedures, but we’ve learned to adapt, and so have our current hospital customers. We’ve worked with hospitals like UCI Health and Duke to establish new procedures for COVID visitor check-in. If you’d like to see how we can help your hospital, feel free to schedule a demo or give us a call at 1-888-718-0807.
