Implementation of an on-line Emergency Unit nursing system

We designed and implemented an Emergency Unit nursing system which has been in practice since March of 1995. The system has been very successful and is used on 97% of all Emergency Unit visits. The system is designed for rapid entry and retrieval of information. We have found that the time spent by nurses documenting patient care in this system is minimal. On average, over a six day study period only five minutes per patient visit, and about 30 minutes per nurse per shift was spent actually entering information into the system. We plan to continue to evaluate the use of the system and expand it to include use by other disciplines in the near future.