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When Galina Aksanov, RN, BSN, a senior staff nurse in labor and delivery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., heard she would have to do all her charting on a computer, she decided her 18-year nursing career had come to an abrupt and unhappy end.

“I thought, I have to quit,” she says. “I’m 45 years old. I can’t even type.”

But the new electronic charting system was designed by Maimonides nurses, with lots of say from the labor and delivery staff. So before giving notice, Aksanov decided to give the program a chance. It took her one day to learn the point-and-click system. The on-screen pages resembled the paper documents Aksanov was used to, but took a fraction of the time to fill out. “Within a week, I was comfortable with it,” she says. Now, she wonders how she ever did without it.

“It helps us cut the time we spend doing paperwork and spend more time on patient care,” she says. “The computer has changed my whole life.”

Bucking a longtime trend of choosing and implementing health care technology based mainly on the input of administrators and physicians, a small but growing number of hospitals are turning to nurses to help test, purchase, implement, and even design equipment and information systems to assist in patient care, patient safety, and data collection.

More vendors and hospital information departments are hiring nurses who can explain to them what nurses actually do and how technology can help them do it. As a result, nurses who feel frustrated or frightened by new systems they don’t like or understand are finding more and more devices that help them care for patients at the bedside.

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In a handful of hospitals across the country, nurses communicate through Vocera, a voice-activated device not much larger than a cigarette lighter that can dial a physician on command or ask if the wearer wants to take a call. Interactive patient stations allow patients and families to check e-mail, do online research, or watch movies at the bedside. Bar coding systems ensure nurses are giving correct medication to patients. Electronic ICUs, called eICUs, give nurses 24-hour support with a team of physicians and nurses who use software, cameras, and microphones to monitor critical patients from a separate building.

Other new devices include “smart pumps” that track and store infusion information, lifting devices that operate from the ceiling of a patient’s room, monitors that enter approved information into a central computer, digital pictures or X-rays that can be called up on a computer at the bedside, documentation systems that prompt responses, and beds that weigh patients and signal the nurse if the patient leaves the bed.

“There’s so much now at the bedside that makes delivering care easier or safer,” says Pat Ahearn, RN, BS, vice president of nursing at Hackensack (N.J.) University Medical Center.

Even bedside technologies that nurses don’t use directly, such as the electronic patient station, help them by keeping their patients happy and feeling less stressed, says Fran Davis, RN, director of the postop surgical unit at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Hospital in Houston. The hospital plans to have stations in every patient room, and eventually nurses could use it to dispense medications and pull up X-rays and lab results, Davis says.

Now, patients use the 15-inch screen to watch television and keep in touch with the outside world.

“I love it,” says Tara Verm, a Dickinson, Texas, resident who has been in the hospital three times in the last 1½ years for unexpected surgeries.

Verm says she used the station to stay in touch with work and pay bills. During her most recent stay, she used it to cancel a family party and saved herself many phone calls, she says. “It has eased a lot of stress.”

Perhaps the best thing about the new nursing technology, say many nurses who work with it, is that much of it is designed and tested with nurses in mind. When vendors bring their products to some hospitals, staff nurses are paid to test products, fill out surveys, and make recommendations. New technology often is rolled out unit by unit so nurses can work with technicians to redesign systems that don’t work.

“Nursing is key because nurses are doing the crux of all the work,” says Nancy Daurio, RN, MSN, associate vice president of management information systems for Maimonides Medical Center. She works constantly with nursing staffs in various parts of the hospital to find out what they don’t like about an information system, then tinkers with it until it meets their standards. Nurses need technology that can be constantly customized and updated, she says.

Some hospitals have nursing technology committees who evaluate and make recommendations on products nurses will use. At Hackensack University Medical Center, 10 nurse informaticists are in charge of evaluating information technology for all clinical staff, says Terry Moore, RN, BSN, nurse manager of clinical informatics. “We use the nursing process (assess, plan, evaluate) and we apply it to technology,” she says.