Nurse Patient Visit Logging.

I'm not in the healthcare industry (and no, I don't even play a doctor on TV), but some sources that might prove helpful include:

For the Record

Healthcare Informatics

HealthData Management

Healthcare Digital

The British Journal of Healthcare Computing & Information Management

and my personal favorite, Medgadget

I dated a girl that was a LPN at a nursing home. And every thing is recorded, potty breaks, med's,.... and for a good reason.

One of the main causes of death in older people is in the toilet, because they are constipated. All of which is investigated and verified.....the records that is....not the bowel movement......yet.

Yes a PDA would be helpful, but remember that the administrator has a budget, and would have to hire a project manager to integrate and implement this type of IT record keeping. And it is not an easy task.

p911

Thanks for the comments. Let's keep looking. Hospice and nursing homes are not the only facilities needing a simple, inexpensive recording reset timer. However, they certainly are at the bottom of the funding scale.

GPS devices are common and integrated into such things as iPhones. At least for single story nursing homes, it shouldn't be a difficult task to create an app: the app would be programmed once with the GPS locations of the principal work locations, then the worker would simply press a button each time they arrive a t a new location, and the app would record the location.

Unfortunately, I doubt if this would work in multi-story buildings. The GPS on my iPhone seems to work fine inside my house, while the phone does not (I have to go outside to answer the phone)! I haven't tried it in a hospital or other large building. I will the next time I get a chance!

What's wrong with pencil, paper and clipboard?

You're baitin' me, mate...right?

not as intuitive to the young'uns these days...

Indeed. Hospital beds across the globe use this method. It works when the power fails. It works when the batteries go flat. It saves the consultant's time, the nurses' time, the dietician's time, and so-on.

If everyone and everything is implanted with an rfid chip and sensors located at all appropriate doorways one could reasonably track the movement of every chip in the system. No intuition needed.

Bob

in the long term electronic record keeping will reduce costs & facilitate a much more usable database

How 'bout a key-fob like device with entry points at every station.....

beside the patient bed, bathroom, etc...

just move the little fob over the sensor, records who you are, location, time, etc.

forwards this info to a database to be scrutinized later...

digitally keeps everyone honest.

I just finished a large translation project for a small community college in northern Ontario, where every nursing student is required to have a Palm Pilot - it's an integral part of the course. I think the problem of keeping logs electronically will solve itself soon.

One of my favorite gripes, going thru locked doors with my hands full was made easier by fobs. One lab I worked at had a keypad where one needed to press 2 of 10 buttons down simulataneously to activate the lock. Not easy to do when you are carrying samples and a notepad.

If I had the programing skills, I would use Java to write an application on a cheap PDA to allow a thumb press to activate a data oint entry "11.03 Entered Room"

For those of you who think as nurse has time to focus on the screen, move the cursor, and type a room number, forget it. And at Nursing Homes, sometimes the nurses have to provide their own pencils. But a cheap PDA...after visiting 6 or eight patients, to be able to sit down and scroll thru a list of enter/leave times would be a godsend.

Is all this data entry necessary? Be there on "inspection day: and try to argue it. That's not the point. Instead of spending 45 - 50 minutes an hour on actual nursing care, many nurses now spend 20 or 30 (or more!) minutes an hour keeping up patient records. And it seems like the govermnet and acreditation bodies push hardest on the less profitable venues where there is no money for all that fancy automated monitoring.

I worked in a 350 bed hospital that had a proximity device (radio) for the clinical employees built into their ID badge. As a vendor, I also had to have one of these temporary ID's. The ID would set off an "event" at different locations ... bed side ... break room ... med room etc. When the employee logged on to the charting program, there was a time and location entry for each event. They just wrote a quick entry (even had predictive text like cell phone 'texting') and clicked a radio button for how it should be filed. There was even a monitor on the nurses station where you could see where everyone was located. Everyone seemed to like it. I heard they were going to implement a portable 'cart station' for the nurses. I think it was going to be a touch pad POS type arrangement. They even had this supply center call an OMNICELL where you selected the patient and the supplies needed. And then, it either spit it out to you, or opened a door where you could retrieve it. Charged, tracked, & reordered ... and another event log.

Good comments from everyone!

Applications have been written and are being written for the iPhone and for Android phones that do all or some of the tasks mentioned here. There is also the possibility of attaching small bar code readers -- or incorporating them into the camera of the phone.

We have several customers using them in hospitals and other medical facilities.

I remember reading about an IPhone barcoding app around the holidays for comparing prices

There is probably a place for RFID tags & other wireless technologies.... The various monitors could dump their data when the nurse makes their rounds... the device would also keep track of the amount time the various professional actually spend in the proximity of the patient

I don't think the average patient would be sympathetic to the nurse whipping out his/her Blackberry or I-Phone just as they enter a room.

By the time a patient is admitted, he has been poked or prodded by so many machines or devices that he won't care if an nurse comes in and makes a few pecks on another electronic gadget.

Here's an option:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2RmdRqVH3E&feature=player_embedded