I-Corps: Mobile App for Nursing Handoff for Use in Education and Practice

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an effective electronic solution for nursing handoffs to support accurate patient information exchange, facilitate information access at the point-of-care, eliminate redundant documentation, and increase patient safety and quality of care. Handoff in health care is defined as the communication process that transfers essential patient information among healthcare providers during patient transitions in care. The importance of nursing handoff education is validated by research findings that handoff failures have been implicated in seven out of eight novice nurses' near miss and adverse events in practice. However, there have been few handoff trainings in nursing education and these are limited or unrealistic. The challenge of creating reliable and repeatable nursing handoffs has led to delays in the competency development of students and novice nurses in navigating and collecting patient condition information, negatively impacting patient treatments. A mobile nursing handoff app may serve as a cost-effective and handy tool to provide opportunities to learn and practice nursing handoffs in an educational setting. A mobile nursing handoff app, designed with evidence-based, structured content will foster appropriate clinical judgment and ensure accuracy, completeness, and consistency in handoff communication.This I-Corps project is based on the development of a mobile app for nursing handoff communications, allowing nurses to view and edit electronic patient data. Responsive web design is built in this app to be used on diverse range of sizes of mobile devices. There are multiple structures or formats for handoff communication in the health care industry; however, there are inconsistencies in the information included in these tools. This inconsistency is a particular problem for students or novice nurses who may have difficulty in identifying the necessary assessment parameters that need to be captured and reported. This app integrates nursing evidence and a well-known clinical nursing practice model to support holistic, systematic, and practical assessments of patients. The app promotes reliable, reproducible nursing handoffs. The app has a rating system to assess and report patient acuity, and color alerts to highlight key concerns. The text data entry fields enable nurses to add notes and communicate priorities in care. Information is updated as the patient condition changes with an audit trail. The features of the app help nurses attend to significant and urgent elements of patient care and support effective and accurate nursing handoff at the bedside, leading to an increase in patient safety.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.