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Charting new territory: giving our nurses back the gift of time
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One of the most time-consuming tasks for nurses is clinical documentation. At HCA Healthcare, we have pioneered a way to reduce the burden of documentation for 94,000 affiliate nurses and allow them more time to provide the best care to patients.
It’s called Evidence-Based Clinical Documentation, or EBCD, and it enables nurses to document pertinent information using standard terminology. Chief Nurse Executive Jane Englebright, Ph.D., shares her perspective about EBCD and how it empowers nurses to do what they do best and ensure our patients receive the kind of care they deserve.
Why is EBCD a game-changer for nursing at HCA Healthcare?
Through a survey of more than 800 nurses, our CNO Council identified a reduction in documentation as a key need for advancing nursing practice at HCA Healthcare affiliate hospitals. We found that a large portion of this documentation was neither efficient nor effective. This required a complete rebuild of nursing documentation in the electronic health record (EHR). We needed to find a way to help nurses spend more time with their patients and less time documenting about their patients. EBCD addressed all of those issues.
What does this mean for nurses at HCA Healthcare?
We streamlined the documentation process and equipped nurses with the technology to make their job of delivering care more efficient. The patient-centered focus of EBCD minimizes the time spent inputting data, and at the same time, allows the information that has been entered into the medical record to be extracted in a more meaningful way. As a result, we’ve seen our nurses save from 30 minutes to two-hours on documentation, per shift.
When we provide nurses with tools like EBCD and mobile applications, we position them to practice at the top of their profession and allow them to dedicate more time to caring for patients.
Is there anything else that you would like to share about EBCD?
More than 170 HCA Healthcare facilities in 20 U.S. states use EBCD. We continue to receive feedback from nurses about how a streamlined and standardized approach to nursing documentation enhances their practice:
I am continuing to receive ALL overwhelmingly positive feedback. Even the novice nurses say that EBCD helps them have more time at the bedside and less time in front of a computer.
This has truly transformed the way we deliver care and is the most direct way I have seen HCA Healthcare support our mission, “Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life.”
Dr. Jane Englebright is the senior vice president and chief nursing executive at HCA Healthcare, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn. She serves alongside more than 94,000 HCA Healthcare-affiliated nurses across the U.S. and in the U.K.
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About HCA Healthcare
HCA Healthcare, one of the nation's leading providers of healthcare services, is comprised of 183 hospitals and more than 2,300 sites of care, in 20 states and the United Kingdom. Our more than 283,000 colleagues are connected by a single purpose — to give patients healthier tomorrows.
As an enterprise, we recognize the significant responsibility we have as a leading healthcare provider within each of the communities we serve, as well as the opportunity we have to improve the lives of the patients for whom we are entrusted to care. Through the compassion, knowledge and skill of our caregivers, and our ability to leverage our scale and innovative capabilities, HCA Healthcare is in a unique position to play a leading role in the transformation of care.
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