cfbrown

Thanks for the replies. Hopefully we will get the interface next fiscal year and this will become a non issue. We discussed documenting Q 1 hr on the computer and otherwise on paper, but the MD's wanted everything on computer so they can log in from their office to view the trends. For anyone out there who has not gone to a computerized system yet, make sure the interface from your monitoring system to the computer is included when you purchase your system. Otherwise your nurses will have to spend a lot of time documenting vitals.

We recently starting computer charting in our small community hospital. What they did not purchase was the interface from our monitors to pull over the vital signs. It is very time consuming to enter them all in the computer manually. Most of our pts are on pressors and our policy is that any titration must have vitals documented when it is done. How are other hospitals in this same situation handling this issue? The rest of the computer charting has gone very smoothly, it is this one issue taking up a lot of our staffs time in ICU. We will try again in next years budget to get the interface approved, but I am not hopeful that it will happen.