Decreasing the Nursing Documentation Burden During the Covid-19 Surge

During the Covid-19 pandemic, nurses requested a clean, streamlined, and intuitive view of the adult nursing assessment(s) within the electronic medical record (EMR). We created a more efficient method during a national disaster to reduce duplicative efforts and allow additional time with patients. This project was added as part of the clinically led EMR optimization strategy to eliminate unnecessary EMR assessment data elements in the adult medical, surgical, and critical care areas. This was completed in a 5-month period and decreased 20% of the data points entered by nursing. A total of 433 data points were excluded or relocated to achieve the desired result.