Tales from the Nuthouse: Lest You Think I have a Really Cool Job

[wolf]

Like many businesses, the employees are constantly asked to innovate, to develop new strategies, to save the company time and money, basically. The rewards for doing so tend to be few, but folks keep trying anyway, right?

So, we're trying.

We can have no patients in the lobby one minute, and ten the next (it's happened).

Sometimes it gets a little difficult to keep track of who is out there, who is being seen, who has been seen, who is waiting to be medically cleared, and who is chasing their loved ones around the coffee table with a butcher knife at home.

We've been using a whiteboard, but it's too small, and you can't see it from any desk in the office. If you put it somewhere that people can see it, you can't reach it (two of my coworkers are under five feet tall), and you violate HIPPA.

So, I came up with this idea. Spreadsheet with conditions and comments along the x axis, patient names on the y. Or is it the other way around ... anyway, it works. It's brilliant. It's on GoogleDocuments, so only people who have been invited to view the document can see it ... we set it up so the crisis workers have read/write and the ambulance can only read it.

It's sweet. Works like a charm. Of course, we're still in the testing stages.

Then, the staff member who belongs half to us and half to first shift forgets that we're Vegas. You know, like in the commercials ... What happens in, etc.

Now we're shut down, "because it might not be secure enough."

We aren't allowed to use, test, or apparently even think about this priceless little gem.

It may be possible to get it moved over to the internal network as an Excel spreadsheet, but too many cooks are already spoiling the soup ... HR thinks it would be nice if nursing had access to it. We specifically don't want that because it would just make them damn cranky to know how many patients are out there. Our own department supervisors may see it as a tracking tool to see how long we're taking from door to unit, or to monitor who is taking how many cases (yes, they've done shit like that before, without taking into consideration that some things are more complex than others).

Who, ultimately, will give the go/no-go on our ability to use our "electronic whiteboard?" CEO's Administrative Assistant aka My Former Supervisor from when I was a Secretary/Receptionist aka The Woman Who Hates My Guts. So, it's effectively dead.

We've come up with a fair number of other good "improvements" that also haven't been implemented. This is just the latest symptom.