A study published at the Acta Anaesthesiol Scand. (2005 Jan;49(1):62-5.) documents what seems to be an emerging (and rather unexpected) trend: Clinical IT (HIS) systems increase the time that healthcare workers spend documenting their activities and not the other way around.
One could always argue that those systems bring other advantages to the patient and to the care providers, but the fact still remains: they take extra time from the healthcare providers and we should be aware of that. The article "Does the implementation of a clinical information system decrease the time intensive care nurses spend on documentation of care?", by Saarinen K, Aho M. of the Department of Intensive Care Medicine, Seinajoki Central Hospital, Seinajoki, Finland, reports: "BACKGROUND: The number of intensive care units (ICU) using a clinical information system (CIS) is increasing. It is believed that replacing manual charting with an automatic documentation system allocates nurses more time for patient care. The objective of this study was to measure changes in nurses' working time utilization after the implementation of a CIS in a polyvalent ICU of a large Finnish central hospital. METHODS: An activity analysis-based comparison of the ICU nurses' working time utilization before and after the implementation of a CIS. .../... CONCLUSIONS: After the implementation of a CIS, an increase in the time nurses spent on documentation of care was detected, which suggests a need for further development of the system. As all the measured time changes were relatively small, any plans to reduce the ICU staff number with the aid of computers were not justified." Source URL: http://e-healthexpert.org/node/120 Links: PMID: 15675984 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] , "Does the implementation of a clinical information system decrease the time intensive care nurses spend on documentation of care?" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15675984&dopt=Abstract