A PDA interactive system to enhance nursing assessment procedures in practicum training
Li Ching-lam, Ng Sin-chun
and Andrew K Lui
Open University
of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China
The Open University of Hong Kong offers Nursing practicum training courses which require students to work in a hospital environment for a period of time. Students are given a hand-held digital device or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to collect information from the patients and report their findings to the School and hospital.
Nursing assessment is very important in the medical field, since it is the first step in the nursing process. It involves the orderly collection of information concerning patients' health status, actual and potential health problems, and area of health promotion.
The research project described in this paper focused on building a software application called 'Digital Nursing Assessment (DNA)' on a PDA which allows users to enter and save patients' information in it and is connected to a PC for editing, viewing and printing. As supplementary functions, the program provides an artificial intelligence analyser engine to recognize which kinds of illness the patients have and present the data on a pie chart. Also the Wi-Fi pager system, which replaces the current hospital pager, can be used to reduce the cost of communication between physicians.
The concept of DNA is a system specifically designed to support medical personnel by providing accessibility to complete and accurate data, clinical decision support systems and other medical aids. The three main foci of the functions provided in DNA are:
Health information and data: A defined dataset, including items such as medical and nursing diagnoses, and patients' basic information, physical assessment and health history, provides improved access to information needed by medical personnel.
Data management: DNA can improve the workflow process by eliminating lost orders and ambiguities caused by poor handwriting, monitoring for duplicate records and reducing the time to fill in nursing assessment forms. Digitized nursing assessments can be accessed more easily than paper records by medical personnel.
Electronic communication and connectivity: The use of Wi-Fi pagers and email with file transfer enhances communication among physicians and different departments.
DNA is the 'next big thing' in health care. There are many forces at work that will cause a change in health care from paper to electronic nursing assessments. Health care organizations, medical schools and even the Hong Kong government have recognized the importance of computerizing the various components of the nursing assessment. The DNA has been developed successfully to enable users to input patents' medical assessment records and synchronize the data between the PDA and a PC. The artificial intelligence analyser engine is a new idea for dynamic illness analysis that helps physicians make decisions in an easy and convenient way.