Imagine What They Can Do When Their Head Is Clear!

I work for a university, hospital, and medical school. I’m a sysadmin, and I do very little in the way of customer support, but I’ve done it plenty in the past.

In April, I had a medical emergency and had surgery. I spent ten days as an inpatient, with strong pain meds and so on.

Every interaction between a patient and anyone on staff is logged into the EMR (electronic medical records) system. It was physically painful watching people navigate between boxes in the EMR system with the mouse when logging an interaction. It wasn’t long at all before I absolutely had to start teaching everyone about the super-simple universal tab-to-jump to the next box.

The nurses began coming in to talk to me, to see if I had any other tips for them. One nurse estimated that the simple tab trick would save them five to ten minutes per day each, which adds up to hours per year.

I am in no way involved in training non-IT hospital staff, but now I want to work up some simple tips-and-tricks tutorials for nurses.

And it all happened on the good drugs. I have no idea how many nurses I taught that one trick to.