Impact of IPMOE on nursing tasks in the medical ward: A time-motion study

INTRODUCTION: The In-patient Medication Order Entry System (IPMOE) was first implemented in the medical ward of Princess Margaret Hospital, Hong Kong. It was a local developed close-loop system including prescription, dispensing and administration modules. Evaluation on its impact on nursing tasks would be important for practice improvement and subsequent system enhancement. OBJECTIVE: The study was conducted to quantify the nursing times across medication-associated tasks for paper-based MAR and computer-based IPMOE, including change in the tasks and time patterns before and after IPMOE implementation. METHODS: This was a prospective observation study in medical wards before (Jan 2014–Jun 2014) and after (Mar 2015–Jun 2015) the implementation of IPMOE. We conducted 8-hr observation studies of individual nurses with a customized application to time various pre-categorized nursing tasks. Statistical inferences and interrupted time series analysis was performed to identify the change in the intercept and trends over time after implementation. RESULT: The average number of medication-related tasks was significantly reduced from 61.07 to 29.81, a reduction of 31.26 episodes per duty (P < 0.001, 95% CI 22.9–39.63). The time for the medication-related tasks was reduced from 32 min (SD = 21.57) to 26.57 min (SD = 11.35) and the medication administration time increased from 37.93 min (SD = 14.78) to 44.37 min (SD = 19.45), but there was no overall significant difference in the time spent on each duty (P = 0.315) between the two groups. An improving trend in the delayed effect was observed (P = 0.03), which indicated a run-in period for new application was needed in clinical setting. CONCLUSION: Our study had shown the time motion observation could be applied to measure the impact of the IPMOE in a busy clinical setting. Through classification of activities, validation, objective measurement and longitudinal evaluation, the method could be applied in various systems as well as different clinical settings in measure efficiency.