Theorize: Printing a record created by a record producer

[David Lundy]

We have a project with a somewhat odd requirement.  I'm curious if anyone can theorize a viable solution.

We're a hospital and we need to service our patient beds.  We've created a record producer via Service Portal which collects information from the nurse/therapist and uses a little backend logic to create a support ticket for the appropriate department.  So far so good.

The main problem we have is that the bed still needs to have some kind of "tag" placed on it, so that the servicing techs know which ones to work on.  We don't need them scouring the beds looking for tiny barcode tags.   The solution being proposed is that we somehow make a printout "tag" with some of the fields from the service ticket printed in large font, which can be attached to the bed for easy reference.

We (the SN developers) have already informed the management that printing from SN is not a simple solution, nor does it typically generate positive results outside of printing PDFs.  We have automatically generated PDFs for printing before, but we can't come up with any way to automate the process such that the patient care staff has to do as little as possible for the tags to be generated AND produce reasonably good results.

Can anyone theorize a solution to this situation?  We're at a loss and the C-levels are demanding something as this is a big deal to them.  Help?

[Swapnil24]

Hi @David Lundy ,

Trying to theorize a solution not knowing the scale of your ServiceNow system and how large the hospital is or how large of an implementation you are trying to achieve.

How about you reverse the process? Like instead of you producing numbers for beds using ServiceNow, how about all the beds get physically tagged with a large enough piece of paper (tag could be just plain numbers or combination of BLDG+Floor+RoomNumber+BedNumber).

Once you have that going, in your Asset/CMDB tables where you have store information about beds, add a custom field that keep track of the physical numbering that was done in step 1. Make sure to match up the physical number with the asset tags so they are not cross-linked to wrong beds.

The result of this could be, when nurses selects beds from an available list it will also have the physical tag numbers which will automatically be displayed on the tickets that are generated and assigned to the departments.

The patient care staff can refer to the physical tag numbers on the ticket and can pinpoint the bed as it should match the physical prints tagged to the actual beds.

Let me know what you think of this.

Swapnil Deo

[David Lundy]

Thanks for the input, @Swapnil24 !

We're a roughly 200 bed rehab hospital.  All of our internal beds already have asset tag barcodes on them, but they're small (2"x1") tags that can be difficult to find sometimes.  We also have specialty beds that we rent from other companies and those don't have our tagging system on them.

It's not the generation of the asset tag #'s that we're needing.  We need the ServiceNow ticket #, time/date, and issue reported (as designated on the report form) printed out.  We can fake it with using Ctrl-P from the browser and printing that way, but it's hardly ideal and the output is kinda small.  We really just need it to print automatically if we can and it doesn't even need to be pretty.

[ben_hollifield]

Hey @David Lundy - This bubbled up on my list due to the mention of barcodes, though I know you aren't necessarily looking for a barcode solution. My company, Yansa Labs, offers a couple of solutions where we address similar needs (but generally when a barcode is needed). These same solutions may be useful to you simply in terms of generating a printable label to put on the beds:

• Barcode & QR Code Generator: The core use-case of this is generating labels for print. Typically they'll contain barcode/QR information, but they don't have to - they can simply contain ticket information in an easily-readable format. Or, there may be a use-case for you to generate a label that contains both human readable text and barcode/QR in a larger format.
• PDF Generator: This is used to easily generated printable PDFs containing record information, and could also allow, with the click of a button, your users to generate a printable/savable PDF that you could then attach to the beds.

Of course, similar use-cases could be accomplished in ServiceNow without either of our products, but these products make the process much more repeatable and user-friendly.

If I've missed the target completely, please disregard. However, if there's anything worth pursuing here, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd be happy to have a discussion with you. Thanks!

[David Lundy]

Thanks for reaching out, Ben!  Unfortunately, we're fine with the barcode solution we have now.  The only troublesome part is on large, complex devices like hospital beds.  But even that really isn't the main issue.

The PTBs simply want the ability to print out a sheet containing the Incident/Work Order ticket #, date/time reported, and the bed component(s) needing repair (presented in a checkbox list).  That's literally it.

We've presented multiple alternative solutions, but they seem to be set on printing for some reason.