The research

The pilot study

Nursing documentation serves three audiences with distinct needs: nurses creating a legal record of the care provided to the patient, clinicians assuming care at handoff, and patients accessing their records under the Open Notes federal mandates since 2021. For the first time, the same clinical documentation could actually work for the nurse who writes it, the clinician who inherits the patient, and, in a future study, the patient reading their own record, instead of failing all three.

Registered critical-care nurses reviewed the same patient admission twice — first as conventional written notes, then as a clinical trajectory visual display (CTVD) — and scored their perceived workload on the raw NASA-TLX after each.

A total of 41 nurses completed paired observations. The mean total NASA-TLX score was 54.95 after the written-first condition and 30.68 after exposure to the clinical trajectory visual display (CTVD)-second condition, corresponding to a mean paired difference of 24.27 points (written minus CTVD; W = 60.5; P < .001). NASA-TLX subscale scores were also numerically lower after the second condition.

As the conditions differed simultaneously in document count and navigation, consolidation and restructuring, visual encoding, and exposure order, the observed paired difference cannot be attributed to any one component. More work is underway to refine this prototype further.

PatentA U.S. provisional patent application, “Automated Clinical Trajectory Visualization Tool for Nurses and Patients”, was filed on March 9, 2026 (Application No. 64/000,179).

Presenting our work

Sharing the study and the prototype with nurses and researchers.