What nurses want

The health care industry’s continued reliance on paper astounds Lillee Gelinas, vice president and chief nursing officer at VHA Inc., an alliance of hospitals and non-acute-care facilities.

Gelinas was making rounds at a major hospital recently when she came upon a familiar sight: a nurse struggling with a huge pile of paper files. A work shift had just ended, and Gelinas assumed the nurse was catching up on the day’s charts. Instead, the nurse told her she had come in on her day off to manually gather data for review by the hospital’s quality committee, which was meeting the following day.

“We have a nursing shortage going on,” Gelinas said. “Is that the best use of people’s time?”

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