News & Press
USC Takes a Faster Approach to Patient Safety
Julio Garcia, Hugo Garcia, and Steve Benitez, of RockWest Technology Group displayed great forward-thinking in 2000 when they determined that Los Angeles County and USC could greatly increase patient safety and decrease patient wait times by upgrading their CR50 card .024 to a CR80 .30 card. The overall cost of this upgrade was calculated at .01 cents per card. At the time, this cost was not supported, so RockWest continued to supply USC with new DCG 275/295 CR50 Embossers.
Later that same year, the Institute of Medicine published their reports on patient safety. These reports suggested that it was time to improve patient safety by adding two patient identifiers, neither of which could be limited to the patient’s name or room number. Although many other medical centers had implemented bar coding to meet this criteria, USC could not justify the expenditure of an additional blaster printer to their existing DCG embosser.
In 2005, Los Angeles County got the approval to build a brand new medical center. With the closing of many of the county’s medical centers, the additional flow of uninsured patients was creating huge patient wait times, and this was adversely affecting USC’s JCAHO and Patient Satisfaction surveys. Receiving overall poor scores on either one of these surveys could result in a reduced reimbursement for USC from federally-funded payers, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
Patient safety was still a major concern and at that time, and the number of patients they saw daily doubled. USC’s bed days per $1000 increased as did the average length of stay. All of these factors combined and resulted in no reimbursement value for USC from any additional days stay or medication and services provided during these days. This lack of reimbursement value directly effected USC’s bottom line and resulted in a huge loss of revenue.
On April 2nd, 2008, Julio Garcia visited USC equipped with several CR80 cards that had been embossed, encoded and topped with silver. The concept cards were met with high accolades and over the next two months, Julio Garcia and USC hammered out the details. After eight years, Los Angeles County finally has the security solution Julio, Hugo and Steve had envisioned in 2000.
