Skip Cleaning

Traditionally, once a clinician finished seeing a patient in a room, a “runner” would come to the room to prepare it for the next patient. Such room turnover might include replacing the paper sheet on the exam bed, amongst other cleaning and disinfection tasks. In some situations, no cleaning would be required, and so the runner’s visit would be wasted effort. There was traditionally no simple way for a clinician to dynamically communicate internally that no cleaning was needed and so most rooms would be visited between patients by the runners. CHIME therefore added a checkbox to the room tablet check-out screen so that clinicians could easily signify when exiting a room that no cleaning was required.

The chart illustrates the impact of adding this Skip Cleaning checkbox for a clinic that uses CHIME. Prior to the addition, roughly 200 appointments a week were identified as not requiring cleaning. After the addition of the checkbox, roughly 400–500 appointments a week were identified. The impact is that the runners unnecessarily visited an exam room between patients roughly 200–300 fewer times per week, with this feature in place. This would have contributed to the overall reduction in work done by the runners. The CHIME team reports a similar impact at other clinics across the country.