NPAR: Features
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Patient History

NPAR lets blood bank staff locate and view patient records from visits to other facilities. The patient search feature is flexible and easy to use.

Smart Search: NPAR's smart search logic finds potential matches despite typographical errors and incomplete records. NPAR also handles special cases such as hyphenated names, initials, spelling variations. NPAR allows both broad searches - name only, for example - and very specific searches using date of birth, Social Security Number, and blood type. The NPAR user examines the ranked results and decides which records to review in greater detail.

Refining Searches: Users can refine their queries without re-entering all of the search criteria.

Large Query Warnings: NPAR contains millions of records. To avoid long waits, NPAR estimates the number of matches before executing a query, and asks the user to refine the search criteria if the query would return too many results.

Patient Lookup by MRN: Users may enter a patient's Medical Record Number (MRN) from their own facility. This instantly populates the search form, and helps avoid typos. From there, a single click launches the search.

Antibody Test Results: If a patient record includes antibody test results, those are displayed using a standard code. The blood bank staff can use this information to help direct their antibody screens. If new tests are negative, that may indicate that a patient's antibodies have dropped below detectable levels.

Hospital Contact Info

Blood bank staff often need to speak with their counterparts at other facilities in order to verify patient identity and obtain additional information about a patient’s testing and transfusion history. NPAR provides contact information for each of its subscribing facilities, available with a single click.

Reference Library

NPAR includes an on-line antibody reference library that describes the serologic and clinical characteristics of each antibody, as well as the incidence of the antigen in various populations.

Reports

NPAR provides managers with activity logs showing the total number of times their staff used the system, number of accesses by staff member, and the specific queries that were made. NPAR can also provide data quality metrics for the facility's own blood bank records.

Patient Privacy

NPAR protects patient privacy in a number of ways:

  • All communications between NPAR and its subscribers is conducted over Secure Socket Layer ("SSL") connections, meaning that all data is encrypted. This prevents network eavesdroppers from reading any data they may observe.
  • Social Security Numbers are never stored in the NPAR database. Before the blood bank data are exported from a facility's database, SSNs are hashed and encrypted into values that have a high probability of being unique, but which no longer resemble the original values and cannot be converted back into an SSN. These hashed values are then transmitted to the NPAR and stored in the NPAR database.
  • NPAR users must provide a password in order to gain access to patient records, and all queries are logged. User sessions time out after a period of inactivity, requiring the user to provide their password again.
  • NPAR enters into a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement with each subscriber facility. This agreement defines the responsibilties for data handling. In addition, NPAR subscribers agree to use the data for patient treatment and quality control purposes only.

Reliability

NPAR servers are hosted at multiple secure locations, greatly reducing the risk of outages from blackouts, natural disasters, etc.

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