Checklists in your E.D.

This blog post is about a product but it's not a sales pitch.  If it is a pitch at all, it's a pitch for a partner -- does it help you to be even better at your job?  Does it fit well into the way your Emergency Department works?  Those are the product's objectives;  if it doesn't meet them, partner with us to make it happen!

Checklists are starting to be accepted in healthcare.  Any job that's complicated can benefit.  Pilots wouldn't take off without first running through a pre-flight checklist, and then there's another for any contingency that could arise.  Nursing is no less complicated than piloting.

Even surgeons are starting to use them.  Dr. Atul Gawande who writes wonderfully of healthcare issues for the New Yorker and wrote the best-seller The Checklist Manifesto tells a revealing story.  When he approached experienced surgeons -- his colleagues and others all around the world -- and asked them whether they'd use checklists, many (80%) said yes, but the others said, no, I know my job, I'm an expert, it would just slow me down;  the suggestion is maybe even a little insulting.  So he reversed the question:  "If you were going in for an operation, would you want the surgeon to use checklists?"  96% said yes.

The product is, of course, NurseMind, an iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) app that has several hundred nursing checklists loaded from a database that's growing.  More are easily added by any nurse, and they can be "tuned" for the way things are done at any particular hospital.

Here are some examples:

• Abdominal Pain
• Abnormal Vital Signs, Severe Pain
• Altered Level of Consciousness
• Back Pain
• Charge Nurse Duties
• Chest Pain, SOB, Arrhythmia, Syncope
• Conscious Sedation
• Dizziness, Lightheadedness, Presyncope
• Ear Wax Removal
• ETOH
• Fever, Hypothermia
• Fractured/Injured Extremity
• Generalized Weakness
• GI Bleed
• Headache
• High Blood Pressure

and many more.  The list is constantly growing.

Interested in trying it out?  Download the app for free from Apple's App Store.  After the first month of use, it asks you to subscribe but if you partner with us -- pilot it at your hospital and let us know what works for you and what doesn't -- we'll comp your subscription for life.

We want to make the app really do what we think it can do for nurses, and be a powerful new tool that helps us all to be better at our jobs.