Can dbtech Generate a Patient Census Report for Leadership at Any Point During a Downtime Event?
Yes, and this capability is more operationally important than it might initially appear. The patient census is not just a clinical tool. It is the information foundation that leadership uses to make operational decisions during a downtime event: decisions about staffing, patient flow, diversion status, capacity management, and communication to the board and external stakeholders. When the EHR is offline and the normal census reporting tools are unavailable, leadership needs an alternative source for this information, and dbtech provides it.
What Census Information Is Available Through dbtech During Downtime
dbtech’s downtime workstations maintain a continuously updated local copy of the patient census through the HL7 ADT feed that runs while the EHR is online. The census data available on the workstations at the moment of an outage includes:
- All currently admitted patients across the facility, organized by unit and bed assignment
- Patient demographic information including name, date of birth, MRN, and attending physician
- Admission date and time, which allows leadership to identify patients who arrived close to the outage onset and may have less complete data in the system
- Insurance and payer information, which is relevant for capacity management decisions that involve transfer or diversion
- Any patients who were in the process of being admitted or discharged at the time of the outage, flagged as pending in the census view
This census data is accessible from any downtime workstation in the facility, which means nursing supervisors, the administrator on call, and department leads can all access the census from their respective locations without requiring access to a specific leadership workstation.
How Census Reports Are Generated for Leadership
During an active downtime event, leadership typically needs census information in a format they can use for rapid decision-making and communication rather than in the interactive workstation interface. dbtech supports the generation of printed or exportable census reports from the downtime workstation data, allowing the administrator on call or the charge nurse to produce a point-in-time census summary that can be shared with leadership, distributed to department heads, or used as the basis for a capacity management call.
The census report generated from dbtech reflects the state of the census at the time of the most recent HL7 sync before the outage, which in a continuously synced system is effectively the census at the moment the EHR went offline. For downtime events of short to moderate duration, this represents a highly accurate picture of the patient population. For extended outages where patients are being admitted and discharged using downtime procedures, the dbtech census is supplemented by the registration activity occurring in the downtime system itself, with new downtime registrations added to the workstation record as they are created.
What Leadership Should Know About Census Currency During an Extended Outage
For outages that extend several hours, the census picture becomes more complex. Patients discharged during the outage period will not be automatically removed from the dbtech census because the HL7 feed that would update their status is not running. Patients admitted during the downtime period using dbtech’s registration workflow will appear in the downtime registration log but may not yet be reflected in the main census view depending on the workstation configuration.
The most reliable approach for extended outages is to have the bed management or charge nurse team maintain a manual log of admits, discharges, and transfers during the downtime period, used alongside the dbtech census view to provide leadership with an updated picture of actual census. This is a process that should be specified in the downtime communication plan before an event occurs so that leadership knows exactly how to request current census information and who maintains it.
For more on how the downtime communication plan should be structured, see our post on how to create a downtime communication plan that keeps everyone informed during an outage. To see how dbtech’s census reporting works in a live demo, request a demo or contact our team.