More than any other hospital staff member, nurses have felt the greatest impact to their workflow in support of Meaningful Use requirements and modern healthcare best practices. Ever-increasing government regulations for improved clinical documentation, in combination with a constant flow of new medical devices, have nurses spending more than 30% of their time in non-patient-care activities. Compound this with hospitals being squeezed financially from new government reimbursement laws, and the new reality is that nursing staffs are being reduced while simultaneously being asked to deliver more effective care. This demand for greater nursing efficiency and effectiveness has led to the creation of today’s modern Connected Clinician.

So what exactly is the Connected Clinician and what is enabling him or her to be more effective and efficient than ever before? The answer rests in new clinical mobile applications running on true Clinical Smartphones. Every leading Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software provider and specialty clinical software company is racing to release new mobile versions of their proven workflow applications to support the growing demand for greater mobility within the hospital. Applications such as vitals collection, meds administration, specimen collection, alarm management, nurse call and most importantly, care team communication are in the greatest demand. Reference apps that provide nurses and other clinical staff easy access to electronic drug data and dose safety information, such as eBroselow SafeDose, or medical dictionaries and disease reference guides, are very common as well.
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In hospitals and clinics, mobile computers help nurses and lab technicians improve the quality of patient care and save lives by providing instant access to a wealth of business-critical information: real-time lab results, a change in a patient’s condition, or verification of the ‘5 rights’ of medication administration at a patient’s bedside.

Zebra’s MC40-HC is the perfect blend of enterprise functionality in a familiar smartphone form factor that can empower your healthcare staff to improve their daily operations providing more time for patient care.

A creative group of nurses are helping Honeywell uncover better ways to use barcode printers and scanners at the bedside. In the past, it was common to see barcode scanners mounted on workstation-on-wheel (WoW) carts behind the display and out of the way. It made perfect sense at a time when reading barcodes was a new and relatively uncommon task. Today, the frequency of reading barcodes at the bedside has dramatically increased and—with Meaningful Use Stage 2—this trend will continue. Nurses using Honeywell’s Xenon cordless barcode scanner quickly discovered that mounting it in an elevated, forward-facing orientation allowed them to fully benefit from the scanner’s “presentation mode” feature. Just like the built-in scanners found at the grocery store, presentation mode scanning is faster because it eliminates the need to squeeze the trigger, and frees up the second hand for quickly handling items.

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