Introduction: Nursing informatics is an important nursing specialty that should actively engage in development and implementation of electronic applications for healthcare documentation. The nursing process is a foundation of systematic planning and implementation of nursing care and as such, it should be adequately represented in modern applications for electronic documentation in nursing. Purpose: The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to compare two applications for electronic documentation in nursing. The comparison is focused on the user experience and on the quality of documented nursing care plans. Methods: The study compared the applications E-documentation in community nursing (E-dokumentacija v patronažni zdravstveni negi) and Think!Med Clinical™. The user experience data was collected with a survey and the documented nursing care plans were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. Qualitative analysis was implemented with two previously validated instruments for quality evaluation of nursing documentation. The study sample included 69 undergraduate nursing students. Results: The Think!Med Clinical™ application was significantly better evaluated by the students in all the survey segments. However, the quantitative analysis of documented nursing care plans revealed a significant difference in consistent use of crucial nursing care plan segments in the documentation, where the E-documentation in community nursing application showed better results. The assessment of nursing care plans with the Quality of Australian Nursing Documentation in Aged Care instrument revealed no significant differences (p = 0,098), while the assessment with the Quality of Nursing Diagnoses, Interventions, and Outcomes instrument revealed a significant difference in the final score means (p = 0,035) in favor of the E-documentation in community nursing application. Discussion and conclusion: The Think!Med Clinical™ application delivered a better user experience thanks to its visual design, speed and simplicity of use for nursing diagnosis documentation. However, the students using the E-documentation in community nursing application more consistently documented crucial nursing care plan segments, which resulted in better quality of the nursing process documentation. The structural faults of nursing care plans made with the Think!Med Clinical™ application are a consequence of incomplete implementation of standardized nursing diagnoses in the application design, since the application includes an inadequate number of possible related factors and does not include defining characteristics as a structural part of the nursing diagnosis.
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