Information Content Across Types of Nurse Cognitive Artifacts.

Acute care nurses commonly use personalized cognitive artifacts to organize information during a shift. The purpose of this content analysis is to compare information content across three formats of cognitive artifacts used by acute care nurses in a medical oncology unit: hand-made free-form, preprinted skeleton, and EHR-generated. Information contained in free-form and skeleton artifacts is more tailored to specific patient context than the NSR. Free-form and skeleton artifacts provide a space for synthesizing information to construct a "story of the patient" that is missing in the NSR. Future design of standardized handoff tools will need to take these differences into account for successful adoption by acute care nurses, including tailoring of information by patient, not just unit type, and allowing a space for nurses to construct a narrative describing the patients "story."

Patient Safety in Critical Care Unit: Development of a Nursing Quality Indicator System.

This is a methodological study and technological production that aims to describe the development of a computerized system of nursing care quality indicators for the Intensive Care Unit. The study population consisted of a systems analyst and fifteen critical care nurses. For the development of the system we adopted some of the best practices of the Unified Process methodology using the Unified Modeling Language and the programming language Java Enterprise Edition 7. The system consists of an access menu with the following functions: Home (presents general information), New Record (records the indicator), Record (record search), Census (add information and indicators of the patient), Report (generates report of the indicators) and Annex (accesses the Braden Scale). This information system allows for measurement of the quality of nursing care and to evaluate patient safety in intensive care unit by monitoring quality indicators in nursing.