Chia-Jung Chen, Supervisor, Dept. of Nursing

As smart technology has evolved, electronic whiteboards for clinical care have been developed to provide medical professionals with timely updates and streamline their workflow. In 2020, the NCKU Hospital’s Department of Nursing established an electronic whiteboard for clinical care and implemented it within all nursing units in the hospital. Through benchmark hospital visits, expert interviews, literature references, and user-needs assessment, the following whiteboard features were completed: (1) Dynamic display of hospital bed distribution, which is conducive to integrating ward bed information and      improving turnover rates. (2) A real-time patient list, which displays patients’ demographic information, care teams, and companions, enabling healthcare professionals to understand patients’ care needs and improve patients’ safety. (3) A bed feed display, which shows the status and location of patients in real-time (e.g., if the patient leaves the ward for ultrasound, computed tomography examinations, surgery, or hemodialysis). (4) A multifunctional nursing assignment system, which displays the number of beds for each nurse and the other responsibilities that nurses on duty must perform, such as fire marshalling tasks, equipment checks, and team leadership. (5) A link to the physician duty list, which instantly displays contact information of physicians, simplifies nurses’ login procedure to the information system, and provides real-time communication with physicians. (6) An escape route map, which is a planar map that provides information on evacuation routes and firefighting equipment to guide patients, families, other healthcare providers in the hospital, and firefighters during evacuation and save lives. (7) The digitization of nursing indicators, in which business intelligence is employed to rapidly analyze and convert data to valuable information such as the nurse-to-patient ratio, number of patient safety incidents, and the restraint rate, which enable effective management decisions. (8) Integration of dashboard information such as the real-time nurse-to-patient ratio, admission and discharge trends, physician duty information, and the temperature and humidity in the wards, all of which enable cross-unit information sharing among nursing stations, inpatient service centers, and emergency units. To protect the security of users, logging in to the whiteboard requires identity verification.

     Figure 1. Multiple functional displays in the bed distribution page.

     Figure 2. Integrated information display in the dashboard page.