I’m reading about impacts of Electronic Health Records on nursing care and morale (not my research area but kind of abutting it).
One thing that comes up is how the amount/density of information stored in these means they’re not inherently more useful than a thick paper chart. You still need to both take in the whole picture and find specific info.
Sometimes it’s really well organized or easy to transfer a patient between units. Sometimes, even though it should be really good at communicating a medication schedule, it doesn’t and you miss meds. Or like one didn’t initially support breast milk as a feeding thing in NICUs. (They got it fixed)
It sounds like that depends a lot on whether it was a case the system was built to support or not.
As complicated and full of cases as libraries are I don’t think you could actually pay me to work with systems related to medicine and health because that is some exponential degree more complicated.
Also a time and motion study in an oncology ward found for any 4-hour segment of a 12-hour shift, nurses spent avg 45 min on EHR and avg 26 min with patients.
When the patient number was above that average, the nurse tended to report feeling better about that segment.
@platypus It's a hard job. I remember nurse changed a dressing for a chemo port (which is reserved for a specialist). They tried to get me to name her, but I pointed out patient care was most important and it was only emergent because they had not followed up.
@platypus They're buried in procudure and policy.
@sullybiker I realized I got a number off but here’s the big ones from the time and motion study:
28 minutes communicating with patients, 24 minutes with other nurses, 6 minutes on phone calls, 6 minutes with family,… 45 minutes on the electronic health record system, 15 minutes on medication
(The rest of the time is a lot of misc things, bathroom, meals, and walking between stuff which apparently took up a decent amount of time because none of these were blocks, all fragments)