The safety design principle of automate where possible really resonates with me because my home care company uses paper charting. There are numerous problems that have come up with this type of system. First, the paper charts take up a lot of room in my patient’s drawers. Sometimes it monopolizes the entire area leaving no room for anything else. This is troublesome for the family who may want to use that area of space for something besides a mountain of paperwork that they do not use. Second, with so much paper many sheets get lost. This would be an enormous problem if my patient had many different nurses or if a fill in nurse needed to know about specific care. Medication errors and treatment errors are bound to happen with such clutter. The charts sometimes have wrong dates on them and the newest ones are nowhere to be found. Since the paperwork gets mailed to the family, it is up to them to keep track of it until they give it to us. Lastly, the paperwork has to be handed in at the end of the week, every week. Since it has the time sheets on it and the care for the day they are very important. However with so many nurses handing in their paperwork at the same time, some are bound to be lost and as a result paychecks can be incorrect. To fix this problem the conceptualization and exploration phases in the design process would likely be used. This is because the problem has already been identified, but new solutions and prototypes would need to be developed. From SCAMPER, the substitute option would be the best choice since it will fix all of these problems. By replacing these paper charts with IPads or secure applications on cell phones, paperwork would become unnecessary, all the time stamps would be uploaded automatically, treatments, medications, doctors’ appointments, plans of care would all be accessible at the click of a button. In addition, the program would not let the user submit the forms without them being fully completed. It is easy to visually scan a paper chart and think everything is filled out, until the office calls and states one box wasn’t checked off. In conclusion the switch to electronic health record would save everyone time and money.
