Hospital Glucometers assigned to Isolation Patients

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Hello everyone! 
My hospital has started scoping a project to assign a Hospital owned Glucometer (we use Nova Statstrip) to inpatients that are in isolation. 
 
Our POC office is thinking this will be a disaster trying to keep track of those glucometers.  Our patient equipment team said they would not be able to "check out" or "check in" glucometers to keep track of these for us. So it truly would be the POC team trying to keep track of these isolation glucometers daily. We are a large 550 bed hospital. Our current set up with glucometers is each inpatient unit has a certain # of glucometers at their nursing stations based on the # of rooms, level of care, and unit layout. 
 
We already have glucometers on inpatient units getting lost on a weekly basis. 
 
When our POC team brainstorms we can only come up with a long list of issues this would cause the POC team, and can't think of a way we could successfully make this work without causing us daily issues. We also don't have a POC member on site 24/7 to check out a meter to new isolation patients. 
 
Does anyone's organization assign hospital glucose meters to certain patients during their admission? I would love to hear if your organization does or does not assign glucometers to inpatients.  And if your organization does, how do you make it work?

Thank you!

3 Replies

Kari,

Personally I don't understand the issue, if your facility is willing to purchase enough meters to be able to assign individual glucometers to a specific patients than what is the issue?  I  would not expect it to be the equipment team or POC team's responsibility to track these meters with the patient, it would be the floor/nursing's role.   Nursing would place a specific glucometer in the patient's room and inform the users that that meter is for that patient.

"We already have glucometers on inpatient units getting lost on a weekly basis." 
  • This would also be a floor/nursing issue, it should not be POC or "the equipment team" to locate misplaced meters.  When a floor loses a meter and inquires about it, the floor manager is provided with the time/date/user of the last person who used the specific meter.  It would then be the floors responsibility to address that user and locate it.  I've been at facilities where depts. would "liberate" glucometers from other depts., this stops when the person doing it is identified.

Unless I'm missing something, sounds like the POC dept is attempting to take on responsibility that belong to the floor/user's.


Something to keep in mind, depending on who your middleware is with, you may find that you have an increased cost in "license".  Meaning how many meters you can have connected at your current contract.  We had this issue come up during COVID and a few nursing units got 1-2 more meters, but not one per room/patient.  They did end up keeping a bottle of strips in the room with the patient, and using proper cleaning wipes with the meters.

We have also experienced meter list. One unit only. This has been discussed with unit manager and min ownership is offered. 
Escalated to cost with meter replacement and I believe this action due to connection with $$$$ has been given some attention by higher level management. We shall see. 

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Kari Echtenkamp
about 2 years ago
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