A Computerized Decision Support Aid for Critical Care Novice Nursing

The traditional health care model of a novice nurse interacting with a senior staff nurse in a mentoring role is not possible in today's world of nursing shortages and high patient loads. In addition due to regulatory and legal issues more traceable digitally stored information regarding patient care is require. Collecting this information in real-time may leave less time to the nurse for actual patient care. In a perfect world, the hospital would have all patients' records and all information concerning a hospitalization stored and accessible digitally. In reality, due to traditional manual data entry, analysis and recovery inadequacies, the nurse does not have real-time access to such information to aid patient care. Presently most patient data collected is aimed at supporting legal and billing concerns not for assisting with primary patient care. This paper described N-CODES (novice nurses' computer decision support system) a research project developing a wireless point-of-care system to assist the acute care novice nurse in making sound clinical judgments.