Mobile Nursing Information System with Learning-on-Demand Services at Taichung Veterans General Hospital

When engaged in multiple tasks under cognitive load and frequent interrupt, nurses are often heavily loaded with cognitive and physical tasks which are highly knowledge-intensive. The Mobile Nursing Information System (NIS) has been developed to ease nurses' cognitive and physical workload in Taichung Veterans General Hospital. The Mobile Nursing Station is a touch panel computer mounted on a four-wheel cart. The client side software of the NIS is installed in the touch panel computer. Nurses could get just-in-time access to NIS right at patients' bedsides through the clinical use of the Mobile Nursing Station. Moreover, the learning-on-demand services are integrated to provide on-line expert knowledge support to foster nursing knowledge development. The system architecture, hardware and software components of the Mobile Nursing Station are described and discussed in this paper. A survey is conducted in Taichung Veterans General Hospital and the results show that more than 80% of the nurses are highly satisfied with this system. Overtime cases are reduced 22.2% (from 81.6% to 59.4%) due to the utilization of the proposed Mobile Nursing Station.