Nurses are the single largest workforce in healthcare, and play a pivotal role in the recovery of patients. However, they face challenges in delivering healthcare services to patients, such as lack of collaboration, poor productivity, and tedious paperwork.
From left : Kit Sumabat, president of Health Informatics, Inc.; Callum Bir, director for health and social services at Microsoft Asia Pacific; and Mila Llanes, president of the Philippine Nurses Association.
To address this concern, Microsoft and HP have launched the Care Mobility Initiative (CARMI), a healthcare mobility app designed to improve collaboration and help reduce paperwork to enable nurses to spend more time caring for patients.
Kit Sumabat, president of Health Informatics, Inc., said there are more than 400,000 Filipino nurses actively working in the Philippines and abroad. In the Philippines, there is 1 nurse for every 15 patients.
“The typical day of a nurse is a very busy one. Besides taking care of sick people, they also have to do documentation and records management,” said Sumabat, who is a nurse by profession. “The CARMI app will allow nurses to be more productive.”
Improved nurse productivity will reduce nurse fatigue, create a better working environment, and help provide better patient satisfaction.
CARMI integrates the use of Office 365, Skype, Microsoft Dynamics Media Listening Tool, electronic medical records, hospital information system, and a learning management system. The app works on HP devices such as HP Stream 7 and 8, and HP Pavillion X2.
Office 365 is a subscription-based suite of productivity tools and cloud services that could help nurses with their documentation efforts. To facilitate access to appropriate information of patients at the point of care, CARMI includes the BizBox Nurse Clinical app.
For the continuous professional development of nurses, CARMI includes NUMI or the nurse mobility initiative mobile application developed by Health Information, Inc. Currently being used at Cebu Normal University, NUMI enables learning anytime and anywhere.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite and Azure enables simplified management of the mobile devices that will run CARMI.
CARMI will also include an App Store that will allow enrollment of nurse-specific apps.
“The availability of CARMI will improve the lives of our nurses as healthcare professionals and in turn, the health of Filipino patients,” said Mila Llanes, president of the Philippine Nurses Association.
Callum Bir, director for health and social services at Microsoft Asia Pacific said the Philippines is the pilot site for CARMI, which is a product of an exclusive partnership between Microsoft and HP.
Bir says CARMI can integrate with the current systems of hospitals. “We just need to coordinate with the vendors of the hospitals to ensure seamless integration,” he said.
