Manual nurse messaging with patient information using a mobile whiteboard system.

Nurses are the backbone of hospitals. They are mobile all the time and they can be anywhere in the hospital. To improve the communication between nurses, publicly visible displays such as manual whiteboards are heavily used in the nursing units. However, HIPAA limits the information displayed in these public displays. In this paper, a software solution called whiteboard which is HIPAA compliant is developed to replace these manual public displays. The software whiteboard is visible only to the nurses and integrates the staff assignments from the nurse call system, the patient and the bed information from the ADT (admission-discharge-transfer) interface, and the staff location information from the location server. Nurses can use this information to improve the staff communication, do the planning, and see the bed occupancy status in their nursing units.