SEATTLE, WA – Greater Seattle Memorial Hospital announced plans earlier today to replace its clipboard nurses with iPad nurses. Specifically, senior-level nursing personnel who usually carry clipboards to monitor hospital staff, in particular disruptive physicians, will be given iPads to more efficiently carry out their duties and “broaden their scopes of practice and physician supervision,” said hospital Senior Vice President for Administrative Affairs, Herman T. Hufflepuff, JD, MBA, MHA.
Hufflepuff, who was wearing a light-gray Armani suit and a deep-purple Ferragamo necktie, and Senior Assistant Vice President for Medical Affairs, Suzanne Scrofulus, RN, BSN, MSN, AIAMU, BIOYN, ROTFL, rolled out the upgrade at a hospital press conference. Scrofulus remarked that the iPads will allow the clipboard RNs to “keep better watch over the medical staff” with the ability to use cameras and audio recordings to document adherence to hospital policies and utilization guidelines. Scrofulus added, “Our nurses can check a lot more boxes by scrolling than they have been able to with their clipboards.”
“The centerpiece of the project will be a focus on quality improvement,” Hufflepuff explained. The QI project will be centered around patient satisfaction scores as the primary measure of its success. “We will use the physicians’ Press Ganeys to figure out if the iPads are doing their job right. If the patients aren’t happy, we’ll sit the docs down to straighten them out. I am not above letting a few people go to make this iPad thing work.”
As a second part of the project, Scrofulus detailed plans to give some of the medical staff iPad Minis to allow them to participate in the QI projects while they conduct their clinical duties. “The whole beauty of this is that the MD providers will be able to check off their boxes as they see patients. We’ll be able to follow in real time who’s checking off boxes and who isn’t, kinda like Santa knowing who’s been naughty or nice,” Scrofulus chuckled. “The iPads should also allow midlevel providers to emulate the most efficient physician workflows for a more integrated staff,” beamed Scrofulus.
Several doctors attended the conference, but their comments were either inaudible or not recorded due to a last-minute microphone malfunction. Hufflepuff concluded the conference optimistically by saying, “It’s not as if the docs can’t handle this. They use the EMR, do CPOE, do MOC projects, just adore those online educational modules, and have daily departmental meetings by web conference, so they should be up for this.”
