U. nurses compute patients' vital signs with new laptops

No, that nurse isn't playing solitaire on that snazzy new laptop. She's recording your vital signs. University nurses at a West Philadelphia clinic are using laptops with specially designed software to better admit and diagnose patients. The Collaborative Assessment and Rehabilitation for Elders Program at 3615 Chestnut Street is the first practice in the Penn Nursing Network to use a software program called "CareFACTS" to store patient data obtained during appointments. But perhaps more importantly, the software will allow for large-scale research projects comparing the efficacy of treatments provided by the CARE Program against other nursing units. "What [CareFACTS] is going to provide us is immediate access to learning much more about our practice: what works and what doesn't," said Nursing Professor Karen Marek, the project's director. Once other practices in the PNN go on line, all patient records will be transferred to a mainframe computer in the Nursing Education Building where researchers can run efficacy studies on the data, said Nursing Professor Lois Evans, director of the school's Academic Nursing Practices department. The system is specially tailored to suit the needs of the CARE Program's elderly patients. "We'll be modifying the program itself, so it actually meets the needs of individual clinics," Evans added. She stressed that this "data warehouse" will eventually receive patient records from nursing units at other universities throughout the northeast, allowing researchers to conduct demographic studies on nursing care. CARE nurses enter patients' symptoms, family histories and previous ailments into personal laptop computers while treating them at the clinic. Patients are "amazingly unintimidated by [the laptop]," according to CARE Director of Clinical Services Joanna Yarkow. "[CareFACTS] decreases the amount of time that we usually spend on all that paper-and-pencil work," Yarkow said. "It helps us do the assessment more rapidly, so we can get right to the treatment. "This was really a challenge for this staff," she added, noting that some CARE nurses had never used a laptop before. These nurses took extra courses to become more computer-literate. The computers also provide CARE nurses with easier access to patient records from previous visits. In the past, nurses looked to a patient's old chart for this information, but these charts were sometimes disorganized or difficult to find, according to Marek. The laptops present a patient's history with the clinic in a more condensed, easy-to-read manner. "[CareFACTS] puts the data where you need to find it," Yarkow explained. CareFACTS, along with other individualized programs used by the Network, was developed by Epsilon, a Minneapolis-based software company which specializes in medical programs. Laptops at other clinics throughout the Network will likely take advantage of advances in software development, such as a mouse interface and a more graphical environment.