Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario Puts “Best Practices” in Nurses’ Pockets

The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO) is the professional association for registered nurses in the province of Ontario. It connects 30,000 members with professional development opportunities, career counselling and resources, and opportunities for educational grants and scholarships. As a strong and credible voice for 85 years, the RNAO also undertakes initiatives on its members’ behalf. It lobbies the Ontario and Federal governments on nursing issues and advocates for healthy public policy.

Continuing education is a big part of of RNAO. It delivers professional development programs and also publishes the “Nursing Best Practice Guidelines”. The guidelines provide nurses with best practices for client care. There are currently 42 published guidelines, many of which are also available in French and Italian.

“Nursing Best Practice Guidelines’ are documents nurses can refer to for a variety of different nursing practices, like preparing a patient for intravenous or instructing new mothers on breast feeding techniques,” said Mike Watson, Web Application Developer at RNAO.

This knowledge is most useful in fields where nurses are dealing directly with clients. With this in mind the RNAO, backed with funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, set out to build a mobile application that would deliver the content from the Nursing Best Practice Guidelines.

“We realized that if we could put the guidelines in nurses’ hands in the field, the information would be more immediate and ultimately more helpful. Nurses would have best practice information to back them up anytime, anywhere,” said Watson. Watson adds that a significant change in nursing demographics is a driver for building the app. “More tech savvy nurses are coming into the workforce, they have smartphones and expect to have this kind of information at their fingertips.”

According to Watson, nurses are using a wide variety of smartphones, from iPhones to BlackBerries and more. This ruled out building the app for a single device. When Watson heard about PhoneGap, created by Nitobi Inc., he knew a cross-platform mobile app was the way to go. “We really wanted to build one application that could be deployed on various phones, and PhoneGap would let us do that,” he said. “PhoneGap was also attractive because we’re big on open source and don’t want to get locked in with one vendor.”

PhoneGap is an open source solution for building cross-platform mobile apps with modern, standards-based Web technologies. Based on HTML5, developers can build PhoneGap apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and deploy them to multiple mobile platforms including iPhone/iPad, Google Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile. With PhoneGap, the RNAO code-base can be ported to multiple platforms, and to new devices that hit the market, like the BlackBerry Torch, BlackBerry PlayBook, and the Windows 7 Phone.

Watson said he hired Nitobi to build RNAO’s app because Nitobi developers originally built the PhoneGap framework and because they, “impressed me with their knowledge and their approach to development.”

Michael Brooks is a software developer at Nitobi. He worked closely with Watson on the RNAO app. “A challenging requirement for this application was to be able to both target the various mobile devices that exist today and provision for future platforms, including new devices like iPads.” To achieve this, the Web-based application uses a single code-base that can be ‘dragged-and-dropped’ into a PhoneGap framework. The application then detects browser features running on mobile devices and delivers an optimal user experience for that device–both today and in the future.

“I like the way the RNAO application offers a rich experience for nurses, even when it’s disconnected from a network. It’s technically challenging to achieve that effect,” said Brooks. This, of course, is a critical feature for nurses in the field who may not have constant connectivity. The RNAO application downloads all content, including images, and can perform a search without the assistance of a Web server.

The app has already been downloaded thousands of times, a number Watson is pleased with. “I’m very happy with the number of downloads and have been hearing positive feedback about how helpful nurses are finding it to have a searchable, mobile version of the guidelines.”

The app is currently in the iTunes store for 99 cents and is rated with 4 stars. It is also available for BlackBerry devices.