Supporting Nurses' Information Flow by Integrating Paper and Digital Charting

Abstract

Abstract. Information technology has changed the way health care is delivered. Electronic health records which are prevalently deployed to replace or supplement paper documentations have made distributed information access at various points of care and work activity achievable with the use of mobile information devices. Our particular concern is with nurse's information flow, where nurse's notes and observations taken at the point of care feed into the electronic record. In these cases, digital technology has not yet entirely replaced paper and pen, because the latter still provide greater ease and flexibility of use when compared to current digital technologies. Even then later manually transposing them into the digital medium. Within this context, we created a prototype that integrated digital paper with electronic health charts to retain the benefits of paper and pen, as well as digital medium. A focus group evaluation of this prototype demonstrated promise and potential for its value in a medical environment.

Nursing Information Flow in Long-Term Care Facilities

“…Research has shown that information flow analysis is an effective method used for understanding user perspectives toward needs regarding HIT design and implementation. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] In the evidence to date, LTC HIT has both positive and negative effects on nursing practice and care quality. 5,6,12,[15][16][17] The careful consideration of the needs of nursing practice specific to the LTC setting was important and is addressed by the majority of the studies.…”

Cognitive Informatics for Biomedicine

“…Based on their longitudinal field studies in a hospital, including the computerson-wheels study previously described, Tang and Carpendale (2009b) developed a prototype technology that made use of digital pen and paper that allowed nurses to continue to use their familiar pen and paper to create their paper notes. The handwritten notes could be easily transformed into digital texts for documentation without navigating the hierarchical EHR system.…”

How to support coordination through annotations?

“…We will focus our future work toward the use of numeric pens [9] to allow carers to create and manage a virtual boundary between the numeric informational system and the local ambient informational ecology. This boundary could be easily set up through turning on/off the device while writing.…”