http://www.bloomberg.com/native/article/?mvi=d250007b426d4ba084d62c8bcce02302
Before receiving their degrees and joining the ranks of their profession, nurses take what is commonly known as the Florence Nightingale Pledge. The original oath read, in part: “I endeavor… to devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.”
The complex realities of modern healthcare make that commitment harder and harder for nurses to honor, and while that sentence has been excluded from the pledge for some time, the responsibility remains. In actuality, modern nurses only spend 20 minutes of each hour on direct patient care, with paperwork and record-keeping tasks reducing the time available to spend bedside. It’s no wonder that the biggest complaint among patients is unresponsiveness to comfort requests, according to a Xerox research study on nurses’ daily activities.
Before receiving their degrees and joining the ranks of their profession, nurses take what is commonly known as the Florence Nightingale Pledge. The original oath read, in part: “I endeavor… to devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.”
The complex realities of modern healthcare make that commitment harder and harder for nurses to honor, and while that sentence has been excluded from the pledge for some time, the responsibility remains. In actuality, modern nurses only spend 20 minutes of each hour on direct patient care, with paperwork and record-keeping tasks reducing the time available to spend bedside. It’s no wonder that the biggest complaint among patients is unresponsiveness to comfort requests, according to a Xerox research study on nurses’ daily activities.
However, the research also identified a large opportunity: If nurses’ administrative duties, specifically those associated with the use of electronic medical records (EMRs), could be automated and the information made easily accessible, it would free more time for direct patient care.
Nurses’ workloads are mostly driven by doctors’ orders and hospital care policies, both of which are often stored in EMRs. Nurses typically start their day by logging into the EMR system and making notes on paper about what needs to be done. As the day unfolds, nurses return to EMRs frequently for updates—to check on medication status, pick up new orders or lab results, or simply to document their activities. Beyond those time drains, EMR sessions can also be cumbersome, and often require navigating multiple menus to get to the necessary information, further reducing the time nurses have to administer care.
The idea that nurses are forced to waste so much time struck a nerve, so to speak, with Xerox researchers. The opportunity they saw was to apply data analytics and mobile applicationtechnologies to help streamline the daily tasks of healthcare providers. This led to development of a “digital assistant” tablet and mobile app, which is part of the Juvo Care Performance Platform—an enterprise-level healthcare management system. The system pulls data from the EMR system and other sources to provide easy-to-access, real-time patient information on a mobile device. It goes beyond just organizing information, providing valuable insights as well. Nurses are alerted to indicators that require closer monitoring, such as blood pressure, and tasks are prioritized based on criticality, allowing nurses to focus on the most important jobs.
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