BACKGROUND Reducing medication turnaround time can improve efficiency, patient safety, and quality of care in the hospital setting. Digital scanning technology (DST) can be used to electronically transmit scanned prescriber orders to a pharmacy computer queue for verification and processing, which may help to improve medication turnaround time. OBJECTIVES To evaluate medication turnaround tim...

BACKGROUND Standardizing the interpretation of "stat", "emergent", "urgent", and "now" medication orders can improve patient safety. However, the effect of implementing standardized definitions on the turnaround time for medication orders in hospital pharmacy dispensaries has not been studied. OBJECTIVES To examine the effects of using formal definitions for "stat", "emergent", "urgent", and ...

Queuing theory and statistical methods are used in this paper to derive formulas for determining average turnaround time in teleprocessing systems that handle messages on a priority basis. This information is needed to ensure, for example, that messages are processed within acceptable time limits and that eficient use is macle of system resources. Factors considered in arriving at the formulas ...

Turnaround time for Papanicolaou (Pap) tests became an important service quality issue at our institution. We studied Pap test turnaround time using engineering process improvement tools and benchmarked turnaround time against data published as a College of American Pathologists Q-Probes study. An IDEF3 process map revealed the complexity of the Pap test process and the opportunities for proces...