Authors (including presenting author) :
Chan CS (1), Koo HW (2), Shiao HY (2), Yeung KS (3), Liu TY (1)
Affiliation :
(1) Dietetic Department, Pok Oi Hospital, (2) Dietetic Department, Tuen Mum Hospital, (3) Dietetic Department, Castle Peak Hospital
Introduction :
The nutrition care process involves nutrition assessment, nutrition diagnosis, nutrition intervention and nutrition monitoring and evaluation. During nutrition assessment and nutrition intervention, dietitians are required to retrieve and integrate nutrition information of common food, hospital meal items, enteral or parenteral products in order to formulate a nutrition care plan to match patients’ nutritional needs. This essential part of nutrition care process involves tedious calculation with a calculator. Sometimes it takes more than a hundred inputs into the calculator before a final decision can be made. Different methods such as lists of proprietary products, dietetic handbooks, or Excel programs have been used to facilitate the process. However, no tailor-made smart phone app is available for this purpose.
Objectives :
To develop a tailor-made smart phone app to assist dietitians in carrying out the nutrition care process.
Methodology :
FileMaker was used to develop the smart phone app. FileMaker was chosen because it allows developers to create user-friendly and convenient user interfaces. There is no ongoing maintenance cost. The app does not contain any patient identification information so it poses no security risk of patients’ data privacy. The app stores nutrition information of over 800 commonly-prescribed local food items, hospital meal items, enteral and parenteral nutrition products. The database is updated regularly. Dietitians can retrieve nutrition information for individual products or manipulate the database to devise a specific meal plan or feeding regimen.
Result & Outcome :
Dietitians no longer needed to retrieve information from different nutrition sources and use the calculator to do tedious calculations. Dietitians can now finish the nutrition information retrieval and nutrient calculations by only a few touches on their smart phones. Dependent on the complexity of patients’ nutritional needs, the estimated time shortened for the nutrition care process is around 30-90 seconds per patient. It saved dietitians’ clinical time from flipping through nutrition information sources and using a calculator. It engages dietitians by giving them more time to perform other meaningful clinical activities.
Co-location with:
