Comments on: How better Technology can help the Nursing Shortage http://interopnurse.com/2008/04/how-better-technology-can-help-the-nursing-shortage/ Thu, 06 May 2010 20:37:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Geek2Nurse http://interopnurse.com/2008/04/how-better-technology-can-help-the-nursing-shortage/comment-page-1/#comment-68 Geek2Nurse Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:06:52 +0000 http://interopnurse.com/?p=229#comment-68 Electronic charting can be effective... it can also be a huge, horrible handicap when people who have no understanding of database design and usability are the ones making the decisions. I don't know who developed the one our hospital uses, or who they talked to about how it needed to work, but it is the most illogical, un-user-friendly, impractical piece of work I ever hope to see. Not to mention just downright ugly! If my team had produced garbage like that back in my software development days I'd have fired the lot of them, and kept their Nerf guns, too! I can do a psych admission assessment and medical history on a patient in 15 or 20 minutes. It then takes me an hour to enter it in the computer. And if anyone else happens to try to update the patient's record before I'm completely done, I risk losing the whole thing. It's not even logically arranged -- I'm still searching for someone who can tell me why "head lice" appears in the musculoskeletal section of the systems information! I have a hard time believing the doctors really have the luxury of having enough time to go through the contortions necessary to even find, let along read our nursing shift assessments on their patients, which sort of defeats the entire purpose of having them... At least when we did paper charting those were conveniently available, easy to find, not in garish blinding YELLOW in a popup window that refuses to scroll down so you can read it, or even stay open for more than a second or two, if you don't remember to click it open with the RIGHT mouse button instead of the default LEFT one. Oh, and of course all the ED charting is in a section the rest of us can't access, so we have no way of seeing what our patient's vital signs have been, or what meds they got before they came to us... Ahh, that felt good. I can't even have a satisfactory rant about it at work, surrounded by people who are victims of the same crappy code as I am, because I'm the only one who recognizes how truly crappy it is. The rest just figure the difficulties are due to their own ignorance of things technical. Electronic charting can be effective… it can also be a huge, horrible handicap when people who have no understanding of database design and usability are the ones making the decisions. I don’t know who developed the one our hospital uses, or who they talked to about how it needed to work, but it is the most illogical, un-user-friendly, impractical piece of work I ever hope to see. Not to mention just downright ugly! If my team had produced garbage like that back in my software development days I’d have fired the lot of them, and kept their Nerf guns, too!

I can do a psych admission assessment and medical history on a patient in 15 or 20 minutes. It then takes me an hour to enter it in the computer. And if anyone else happens to try to update the patient’s record before I’m completely done, I risk losing the whole thing. It’s not even logically arranged — I’m still searching for someone who can tell me why “head lice” appears in the musculoskeletal section of the systems information!

I have a hard time believing the doctors really have the luxury of having enough time to go through the contortions necessary to even find, let along read our nursing shift assessments on their patients, which sort of defeats the entire purpose of having them… At least when we did paper charting those were conveniently available, easy to find, not in garish blinding YELLOW in a popup window that refuses to scroll down so you can read it, or even stay open for more than a second or two, if you don’t remember to click it open with the RIGHT mouse button instead of the default LEFT one.

Oh, and of course all the ED charting is in a section the rest of us can’t access, so we have no way of seeing what our patient’s vital signs have been, or what meds they got before they came to us…

Ahh, that felt good. I can’t even have a satisfactory rant about it at work, surrounded by people who are victims of the same crappy code as I am, because I’m the only one who recognizes how truly crappy it is. The rest just figure the difficulties are due to their own ignorance of things technical.

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