Paper
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Informatics and Technology in Nursing
Planning for Informatics Support of Nursing: What Five Years of Data Can Tell Us
Michael E. Beebe, RN, DNS and Randy Grekowicz, RPh, MBA. Clinical Information Management, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle, WA, USA
Learning Objective #1: Describe the key relevant issues in planning for the support of nurses who are or will be using some time of health information system.
Learning Objective #2: Describe at least three strategies for adequately supporting nurses who must some type of electronic care documentation system.
Popular and clinical literature has been chronicling the increasing movement of health care agencies to electronic means to capture information about the care given to patients. Since nurses generally represent the largest user group in any health care setting, attention should be given to supporting nurses as they move towards the electronic health record and electronic documentation of medication administration. For the last eight years our agency has had a completely electronic health record for all in-patients and out-patients. For the last five years we have electronically documented all inpatient medication administration. During this time we have been collecting data relating to user assistance calls to our clinical support group. In this study we will report on data collected from calls by all users to the clinical support team in a large VA medical center with more than 3,500 users, with approximately 20% nurses and student nurses. Over a five month period in 2005 we recorded 668 calls, with approximately 20% missing data. Nurses represented 33% of those calls. We have found that the largest single source of help calls is difficulty with user sign-on to our various electronic systems. With so many different systems and because of patient data privacy requirements, users will have at least three different sets of log-on codes with some having even more codes. This information, along with other results from this study, could assist nurse managers and planners in building support systems that facilitate nurses in their use of electronic documentation systems. Such information could prove valuable to agencies that are planning implementation of electronic health records. Our own anecdotal experience has taught us that providing adequate support before and during system implementation can go a long way towards achieving a successful implementation of electronic health record systems.

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