How Hospitals are Balancing Visitor Management Challenges with Continued COVID Screening Requirements

The early months of 2020 ushered in a virus that not only took over headlines, but took over the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people around the globe, bucking social norms, workplace rules, and basic everyday life. Healthcare workers find themselves at risk, working round-the-clock to find a cure, comforting those afflicted, and protecting the public from an invisible foe. The pandemic brought unprecedented challenges and decisions that require nimble and unique solutions.

Prior to COVID-19, hospitals had a need to capture, record, compile, and verify information from their patients, and tracking visitors has always been an important part of facility operations. As social distancing and contact tracing have become important processes for hospitals and healthcare workers in this new normal, visitor management has become even more important for the healthcare industry. Many lessons can be learned from the pandemic for healthcare workers, even well after a vaccine has been distributed. One important lesson for hospitals from this pandemic is the increased importance of collecting, tracking, and maintaining information on staff, vendors, and any guests visiting their facilities. 

Hospital administrators must determine how to effectively create a safe environment for patients, staff, and visitors. From daily health self-attestations, to on-site temperature checks, to technology such as contact tracing and thermal cameras, facilities are searching for the best methods to ensure staff and visitors are well enough to enter the facility. In addition, this same technology can check anyone entering a hospital for potential symptoms without incurring prohibitive costs, taking up valuable time, or violating personal privacy protections. A visitor management system is the ideal technological solution, it satisfies the compelling need to know who is in the hospital and to know more about them, from a safety and security perspective and from a health risk perspective.

Healthcare facilities have unique security and surveillance needs, ensuring the safety of staff, patients, and visitors while maintaining the highest level of privacy protection. Navigating today’s healthcare landscape requires specialized tools that meet the unique needs of managing patient data while covering the complex demands of securing patients, staff, and guests. A visitor management system that integrates with the hospital’s HL7 patient database is essential for managing patient location look-ups, patient restrictions, outpatient appointments and managing visitor limits.
  • Safeguard Patient Data. Provide a seamless and efficient platform that links patients to visitors for advanced visitor registration and directs visitors to the correct room. 
  • Manage Visitors. Maintain watch lists for restricted visitors, automatically track the number of visitors for a patient, and keep real-time statistics for the number of visitors on premises.
  • Maintain Compliance. Ensure your facility conforms to HIPAA privacy laws during patient look-ups from the front desk or via a self-service kiosk.
  • Registration Options. Convenient self-serve kiosks available to streamline the visitor registration process and web-based pre-registration allows staff and patients to pre-register visitors. Plus, mobile solutions available for Hospital Ambassador and Roaming Navigator sign-in options.
  • Contactless Pre-Entry Health Survey Administration. Streamlines the attestation process and incorporates an automated pre-screening solution that handles most of the work online and allows for contactless check-in upon arrival.
All healthcare facilities face similar challenges: screening visitors against watchlists and for COVID symptoms prior to allowing access, all in a safe and efficient way to avoid lines and dissatisfaction. This is crucial to providing an optimum visitor experience at healthcare facilities, from the local doctor’s office to expansive healthcare campuses that include hospitals, clinics, and critical care facilities. Add a global pandemic to the equation and the challenges increase many times over. A visitor management system can handle these challenges and adapt as necessary, ensuring allowing caregivers to treat patients with a sense of security and protection.

Want to learn more about our PassagePoint Visitor Management System? Check out our website here.

Protect your hospital against security threats while maintaining an open and inviting environment with PassagePoint HL7, the most scalable healthcare visitor management solution available. PassagePoint HL7 is an easy-to-use, on-premise Healthcare Visitor Management System that manages the security and safety of your patients, staff, and visitors. The system uses an HL7 Listener to receive real-time ADT (Admission/Discharge/Transfer) messages from the Hospital’s Patient information system to access patient location restrictions, outpatient appointments, and to manage visitors.