Doesn't my hospital's EMR already do this? Why would I need NurseMind?

Yes, EMRs (electronic medical records) do some of what NurseMind does, but there are subtle yet important differences that fill a unique, unmet nursing need.

EMRs are order-driven and chart-centered, yet many nursing tasks do not come from orders and are not charted. Such activities include taking report, taking breaks, stocking rooms and carts, and routine patient care tasks such as hygiene and feeding. To effectively manage his or her time, the nurse must budget for all these -- charted and uncharted, ordered and not ordered, billed and not billed -- yet the EMR does not support this aspect of nursing work.

To do effective time management, the nurse must plan for everything he or she does that takes time, regardless of whether the EMR keeps track of it. That's what NurseMind does: it knows what nurses do -- everything they do -- and it supports the remembering and planning that it takes to do all these things completely and well.

Look at this question financially. Much of what comprises nursing service is rolled into a hospital's room rate. Most routine nursing activities are not distinct, billable line items. Thus, there is less incentive to track them in EMRs.

Perhaps the most useful way to describe the difference between NurseMind and an EMR is that EMRs are patient-centric whereas NurseMind is nurse-centric.  That is, the EMR serves primarily to meet the needs of the patient whereas NurseMind is a tool by and for nurses. It exists to help them be more effective and efficient in their work.

An example of the patient-centric nature of EMRs is that most are capable of displaying a nursing care plan-driven task list for a given patient, but not for all of a given nurse's patients combined into a single task list. Yet, such a list is extremely helpful to the nurse in setting priorities.

If you can see everything -- for all your patients -- that you need to do right now, you can choose from that list the action that's most important. This is one of the hardest parts of your job: deciding at any given moment which, of all the actions that await you, to do next. Given a list to choose from, this challenging cognitive task is made easier.