An In-Patient Nursing Documentation Application for Smart Phones

Abstract

It is a widely known fact that mobile hardware and software technologies are exponentially evolving. Even though the health industry is taking advantage of these technological advances, very little has been accomplished from a nursing perspective of electronic medical records documentation applications. Nursing tasks remain mostly documented via rudimentary, inefficient, and time-consuming pen and paper methods. There is very little research literature regarding the use electronic devices for nursing documentation. In this article we describe a nursing documentation system implemented for the Android platform running on smart phones. The system is a successor of a previous PDA-based nursing documentation system. The general functionality of the original PDA-based system is described as well as the validation of the user interfaces of the system. The new smart phone-based system is described and at the same time contrasted with the PDA-based system in terms of their user interfaces and interaction paradigms. In general, the transition from the PDA version to the smart phone version was painless because it was possible to transfer most of the user interface paradigms from de PDA system and also reuse the database that held its electronic medical record. We expect the new system to be more agile in terms of interaction because of the improved interaction paradigms of smart phones and also because many nurses will be using it on a very familiar device.

Keywords: mobile medical applications, computer-based medical systems, nursing documentation, smart phone medical applications, electronic patient record systems

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100527