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“It works great in times of crisis: When the nurse is actually doing things for the patient, the computer is keeping track of the data so the nurse doesn’t have to remember or find the paper towel she wrote that information on,” he says.

Even when things go smoothly, the system gives a patient’s health care providers more detail, he says. Nurses’ notes alone can run 44 pages long. Each patient has an interdisciplinary plan of care online, which is upgraded each shift. “It’s really in-depth,” he says.

Nurses at the Mayo Clinic Hospital say electronic notes allow them to document more details more quickly, says Judy Whitman, RN, MSN, CCRN, clinical director of critical care and cardiac monitoring.

“I have not done any studies to determine if we save any money,” Whitman says. “However, I can tell you the nurses would not go back to paper.”

Furthermore, the entire Mayo Clinic Hospital uses paperless documentation and has since it opened in 1998. “It is easy to navigate the system if a nurse is floated into another unit,” Whitman says.

Techno time-saver

Fresno (Calif.) Heart Hospital has not yet installed an interface between the computer and the monitors — nurses still must type in a patient’s information — yet even this advance has administrators and nurses praising the system, says Pilar de la Cruz-Reyes, RN, MSN, the chief nurse executive.

“From an administrative viewpoint, it’s a wonderful tool when you have to review a chart and you don’t have to try to decipher things,” says de la Cruz-Reyes, a self-described “old-time nurse” who, like the 103 nurses in her employ, quickly adapted to the new system. “This is the wave of the future.”

For example, she says, nurses are notorious for not completing individualized nursing care plans for each patient, a time-consuming process. But the $2.2 million Medi-Tech system provides templates for all conditions, problems, and associated outcomes.

“You don’t have to start writing from scratch,” de la Cruz-Reyes says.

Not only does the system compensate for messy, hurried, varied, or incomplete handwritten notes, but it also offers instant results. In keeping with the fast pace of the information age, X-rays are available on screen as soon as they are processed, with no smudged fingerprints obscuring the results.

A nurse can look at a patient’s lab work the minute the results are in.

And everyone with security access — from physician to nurse to administrator — can look at the chart at the same time, de la Cruz-Reyes says.

Bonnie Brock, RN, BSN, is the informatics nurse at Fresno Heart Hospital who helps nurses make the transition to computerized charting.

“The ease of information retrieval is really key on this,” she says. “I can see the picture of what took place with the patient so much faster than if I had to look through a paper chart.”

When Fresno Heart Hospital opened its doors, Brock had been training her nurses for six weeks. She gave them four four-hour sessions, plus four hours on the system outside the classroom using fake patients.

Now that she has nurses on the floor who know how to use the system, she has reduced the number of four-hour sessions for new nurses to three.

“It’s very scary that first day,” says Brock, remembering some comments she heard from new users. “The first day you take patients and use the system you will probably say, ‘I can’t do this.’”

Yet not even one year later, Brock has discovered some of the nurses she worried would have the hardest time with new technology have been the best users.

Getting up and running on the computerized ICUs is perhaps the smallest drawback to the system. System upgrades or changes can cause serious or hard-to-find errors, says the ANA’s Bickford.

“Software coding is a complex process, and if you’re not paying attention, things go wacko,” she says. Errors have happened in the past, she says, and no governing body tracks these errors.

While computer errors are the nightmare of programmers, other more seemingly mundane problems must be discussed as the country’s health care facilities move toward computerization, Bickford says.

If software becomes obsolete or a software maker goes out of business, how is the stored data retrieved for use? Then there is cost — wires, monitors, disposal, updated software, electricity. How do facilities absorb the cost?

Finally, a move to standardize terminology and practice is just getting under way, Bickford says.

And, of course, sometimes systems go down. Roberts of Cedars-Sinai says the hospital has a paper backup system in case of technical trouble.

Weena Gorospe, RN, BSN, an overnight nurse on the Cedars-Sinai surgical ICU, loves the system for making her job easier, but she agrees that things become much more difficult when the system goes down.

“You’re helpless,” Gorospe says. “All your data is in the computer, so there’s no way you can access it. You have to go back and forth, grab vital signs from the bedside, and copy all medications onto the trifold.”

Yet such breakdowns are rare, and Gorospe says she loves the system.

“It makes it easier for us, and it’s really more accurate,” she says. “To me, it gives more time for direct patient care.”

Heather World is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. She writes part time for health care and children’s publications.