Balancing Patient Care and Paperwork

Effort and quality of care documentation are among the most pressing challenges in the nursing domain due to demographic development and compliance demands. Hence approaches for decreasing the effort of documentation while increasing its quality are required. This work introduces the idea of automatic task completion and documentation which is achieved through a process-aware solution where physical objects utilized during care tasks are equipped with NFC tags. Nine use cases from the care domain are identified with domain experts and implemented through a proof-of-concept prototype. The time reduction of employing this technology is assessed by domain experts within the typical routines in a nursing home. The interviews indicate an average decrease in documentation time per shift of more than 60%. Inherently also documentation quality is increased as automatic documentation prevents forgetting to document certain steps or other errors. On top, this work fosters two ways for comprehensive documentation, i.e., log-based documentation for analysis and monitoring tasks and paper-based documentation as typically expected by nurses. The logs are automatically created and stored by the underlying process engine. It is shown how paper-based documentation can be automatically created based on process logs. Overall, this work provides the basis for automatic, comprehensive, and continuous documentation of care tasks based on NFC technology.