MobileNurse: hand-held information system for point of nursing care

Healthcare information travels with patients and clinicians and therefore the need for information to be ubiquitously available is key to reliable patient care and reliable medical systems. We have implemented MobileNurse, a prototype point-of-care system using PDA. MobileNurse has four modules each of which performs: (1) patient information management; (2) medical order check; (3) nursing recording; and (4) nursing care plan. MobileNurse provides easy input interface and various outputs for nursing records. The system consists of PDAs and a mobile support system (MSS) which supports clinical data exchange between PDAs and hospital information system. Two synchronization modules have been developed to keep the patient data consistent between PDAs and MSS. Clinical trials were performed with Six volunteered nurses. They tried MobileNurse for 1-day caring-simulated patients. According to the survey after the trials, most of volunteers agreed that MobileNurse is more helpful and convenient than other non-mobile care systems to check medical orders and retrieve the results of recent clinical tests at the bedside. Through the involvement, we found out that ease-to-use interface is the most critical successful factor for mobile patient care systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.