HMS Charting AKA: High Maintenance Stuff!

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Our hospital, as of last week, converted from Meditech to HMS charting. It is total chaos at our facility! We were given 3 days of classes 2 months ago before going live. The Super Users were given 2 weeks. Regardless of the "education" we received on the system, we are finding it is taking much longer to chart (we now chart at bedside) on a system that is suppose to take less time. We hit the floor running at the beginning of the shift and are never out of the facility until around 8 pm. And, to top it all off, the HMS gurus are constantly breathing down our necks to top our patient care to rid our screen of red triangles! Horrible! I feel like the quality of patient care is slipping.

Does anyone that has used HMS have any tips or "shortcuts" that can help us do what is expected of the system and still deliver quality pt. care? We are dehydrating because we don't have time to drink..hypoglycemic because we are not able to go to lunch and eat (we work in ICU and can not leave the floor)..mentally unstable because our brains have fried! HELP!!!

[NevadaFighter, BSN, RN]

I'm sad that no one ever answered you on this! I'm getting trained on it right now as a new grad.

My experience with HMS was horrible. I don't think one could make a more dysfunctional piece of software if that were one of its design objectives. It made NextGen, another total dog, look good by comparison.

Our Epic deployment where I now work is pretty dang functional... It's still obvious that the coders have had little input from nurses who are actually doing the job but it's pretty good... and much better than paper (something which I cannot say about the other two).

Sorry you're stuck using HMS. The only good news is that it'll probably go the way of the dodo bird eventually. You can polish a turd all you want but it's still a turd.