Home Health Nurses' Initial Experiences with Wireless, Pen‐Based Computing

Abstract

Eight home health nurses from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York participated in a focus group discussion after their initial experiences using wireless, pen-based computing in the inner-city, home care environment. Transcripts of the nurses' responses to open-ended questions were analyzed and central themes were found, following the method of concept analysis described by Strauss and Corbin (1990). The central concepts were "Readiness," "A thousand pounds on my back," "Call for support," "Problems with transmission," "Using the computer as an assistant," "Nurses discovered glitches," and "Everybody has to have a computer." These themes reflected the nurses' initial experiences with the wireless computers and also revealed their concerns. This article will describe these themes and will discuss the implications of current improvements in wireless computing for health care. The focus group themes aided in understanding how this group of experienced home health nurses began to transition from handwriting on several different forms to checking-off items on a small, hand-held computer screen, from innovating methods to communicate when telephones were not available, to using a wireless computer to send and receive data involved in the patient admission process

Nurses’ perceptions of their documentation experiences in a computerized nursing care planning system

“…1996, Daly et al. 2002), but most studies on computerized nursing documentation have focused on nurses’ attitudes towards computers and seldom specifically explored the influence of this technology on nurses’ perceptions of the documentation process (Stronge & Brodt 1985, Harris 1990, Simpson & Kenrick 1997, Wilson & Fulmer 1998, Stricklin et al. 2003, Darbyshire 2004).…”

Development and Testing of an Evaluation Scale of Personal Digital Assistants

“…In addition, nurse participants wrote negative comments about device features (data entry, response time, system downtime, and concerns about theft and loss), similar to comments from previous reports. 10,11,19,20 However, the clustering of these negative items in one construct may pose a response bias for the ESPDA, which could be eliminated by changing the language or wording of some items. [34][35][36] Because user concerns about PDA features such as screen size, device theft, and data transmission are not unique to this study, these issues deserve further research and improvement.…”

“…Early qualitative studies found that although home health nurses welcomed using penbased wireless computers in their daily practice, they were concerned about issues of hardware maintenance, technical support, and device theft or loss. 19,20 Penbased computers improved the quality of documentation for home health nurses compared with manual records by providing immediate access to an easily readable record and decreasing calculation errors, but the time spent on patient care and documentation did not change significantly. 21 In addition, PDAs were used to establish a database for an intravenous resource nurse service, but its use was limited by slow response time after entering large amounts of data and by the attention needed to maintain the hardware (eg, keeping the battery charged, avoiding accidentally dropping the PDA).…”

Adopting a personal digital assistant system: application of Lewin's change theory

“…Nurses' perceptions of using handheld computers have been explored for documenting home care (Wilson & Fulmer 1997, 1998 and managing intravenous consultation services (Bosma et al 2003). Although nurses valued the PDA's assistance in organizing daily practice, retrieving point-ofcare information, and integrating with statistical analysis software, these studies reported that nurses experienced obstacles such as fear of losing PDAs or styluses, data transmission problems, software (screen) freezes, hardware breakage and slow responsiveness after entering a large amount of patient data.…”

“…Nurses’ perceptions of using handheld computers have been explored for documenting home care (Wilson & Fulmer 1997, 1998) and managing intravenous consultation services (Bosma et al. 2003).…”