Nursing Admissions Process Redesigned to Leverage EHR at Christiana Care

Jennifer Guite, RN, MS, Project Manager and Clinical Analyst, Mary Lang, RN, MS, Director of Nursing Informatics, and Patrick McCartan, RN, MSN, BC, Nursing Informatics Team, Christiana Care Health System, Wilmington, DE. Christiana Care, a two-hospital, 1,000-bed health system, redesigned its nursing admissions process to provide a centralized source of assessment information. An interdisciplinary team redesigned the assessment process leveraging the clinical documentation, decision support and workflow EHR tools. Nurses use a wireless device at the patient’s bedside to enter admission information. A series of decision support rules evaluate the information and send electronic referrals to appropriate ancillary departments.