Digital whiteboards have become very good at displaying information from the electronic medical record.
Patient name.
Care team.
Medications.
Daily goals.
Discharge plans.
Precautions.
All of that information moves from Epic to the whiteboard, where patients, families, and clinicians can actually see it.
That is useful.
But until now, the conversation has mostly moved in one direction.
Epic talks.
The whiteboard listens.
The nurse still documents somewhere else.
Today, that changes.
We are launching HCI ONE Rounding, the newest product in the HCI ONE platform.
The nurse opens the rounding application directly on the whiteboard and completes the workflow with the patient in the room.
The patient can participate.
The nurse can confirm the information while the conversation is happening.
When the round is complete, the information is returned to Epic.
No paper notes.
No separate tablet.
No promise to enter everything later.
Later is a dangerous word in a hospital. Later usually arrives three hours behind schedule while someone is eating lunch at 4:30.
Most importantly, the nurse does not have to document the same work twice.
Healthcare has always had an interesting relationship with duplicate documentation.
If entering something once is helpful, entering it again must be twice as helpful.
Except it is not.
It is just twice the work.
I want to be honest about something.
Writing information back to Epic is very specific work.
Epic knows exactly where information belongs, exactly what format it should arrive in, and exactly what it will do with anything that shows up dressed incorrectly.
It will not negotiate.
Honestly, that is exactly how a medical record should behave. The system protecting the patient's chart should not be flexible about what gets written into it.
But it does make for an interesting week.
What we planned as a one day installation took four.
Day one, we were confident.
Day two, we were humble.
Day three, we were educated.
Day four, it worked.
The learning curve was steep. It is also behind us now. Every field, every rule, every requirement is documented, tested, and repeatable.
That is the real value of doing the hard work once.
Now we standardize and repeat.
The next hospital gets the four days of lessons without the four days.
A connected patient room should do more than display information.
It should help clinicians complete real work.
Epic sends the patient context to HCI ONE.
The nurse completes the round on the whiteboard.
HCI ONE sends the results back to Epic.
That sounds simple.
As we just explained, it is not.
Behind that simple workflow are identity, security, patient matching, permissions, data mapping, documentation rules, testing, and enough meetings to make everyone question whether the first whiteboard and marker were really so bad.
But the complexity should remain behind the screen.
For the nurse, the experience is simple.
Open the workflow.
Round with the patient.
Send the information to Epic.
The whiteboard started by replacing a marker.
Now it can complete a clinical workflow and write back to Epic.
That escalated quickly.