Cognuse offers solutions for improving nurses’ work quality

The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife to draw attention to the role of nurses and midwives and the increasing need for them in healthcare. Cognuse is part of the Connected Health Cluster and has a solution to support nurses in performing day-to-day procedures, thereby improving the quality of their work and reducing variability and any issues arising therefrom.

Cognuse’s solution is called CoNurse and helps integrate nursing-related instructions and procedural protocols seamlessly into the workflow. Nurses have access to more than 300 procedural protocols, guidelines and checklists every time they undertake a procedure to help them remember their responsibilities.

According to Andres Mellik, the founder of Cognuse, CoNurse is not a checklist tool but a system for implementing instructions. “It has been proven that standardisation and compliance with evidence-based guidelines has a positive impact on patient safety as well as the reduction of unwanted deviations and variations,” Mellik explained. “Our solution is perfect for the learning process and offers valuable support primarily to nurses who have less experience. At the same time, CoNurse is useful for experienced health care professionals who perform certain procedures rarely.”

The daily use of instructions is boosted if the instructions are remotely accessible the moment the nurse has to attend to the patient.

The solution is coupled with a Bluetooth headset for hands free operation to mitigate the risk of infection and comply with the hospital’s quality goals.

Mellik says that making changes in the work processes used in a hospital is always a challenge, but Cognuse’s solution has been used in a pilot project at the North Estonia Medical Centre, which was Cognuse’s partner in a joint development project funded by ECHC, as well as the West Tallinn Central Hospital, East Tallinn Central Hospital and Tartu University Hospital. An agreement to use the tool has also been reached with the first hospital in Germany and negotiations are under way to involve hospitals in the United Kingdom and the USA, where Cognuse has been operating for the last six years.

“Today, we provide remote access to over 70 guidelines and 120 nurses have used the tool at the above hospitals,” Mellik added.

The Connected Health Cluster, led by Tallinn Science Park Tehnopol, is Estonia’s largest health technology community, bringing together health service providers, health technology companies and all other relevant stakeholders. With the help of the cluster, it is possible to carry out national cooperation projects and export health technology solutions to other countries.

The activities of the cluster are supported by the European Regional Development Fund.