Meet Amelia Roberts, RN

What do you love about being a nurse?

What I love about being a nurse is the perspective I get! From where I stand, I see life with all that it offers, both problems and solutions. In my nursing role, we deliver patient care in a variety of forms. This viewpoint shows me both challenges and opportunities that patients face in navigating the healthcare system. In my role as caregiver, I have a clear view of solutions that support how care is delivered. Nursing gives such a unique perspective of what works on the user interface side. This viewpoint also shows clearly, what does not work in terms of user experience. Being an end user of a variety of healthcare technologies, I see many well-meaning companies who hope to facilitate communication among providers and disconnected healthcare systems. As a nurse, I feel it is a duty to contribute to solving these and other challenges that impact patient care.

How does contributing to solve these challenges look?

A few years ago there was a Hackathon at a local healthcare facility. I submitted an idea on an app that would facilitate discharge planning. As a finalist, I had the opportunity to see my app go from idea on paper to an experience that I could actually engage with on an iPad! Not much happened from there. Due to various system-level challenges, the app could not be put into practice. Since then I’ve been actively engaged in conversations with a variety of tech companies who offer similar discharge planning solutions. In my role as a provider of solutions, I find joy and connecting such founders with Healthcare Champions and health care decision-makers. My aim in facilitating these conversations is to break down some of the silos that prevent cross-pollination of ideas.

What do you love most about being a nurse?

Thinking of the unique perspective of the registered nurse, I would love for more technology companies to seek out having nurses as part of their team, if not only as a focus group. It would make sense to have these nurse stakeholders part of the conversation during the front end development of Technology as well. Many times nurses are included on the back end in terms of creating workflows for implementation. Many challenges are discovered during implementation that could have been avoided if nurse input was sought earlier in the process.

Related to solving this challenge,  I’ve enjoyed participating in a variety of electronic medical record user-testing opportunities. What I love about nursing is the opportunity that it gives me in connecting the problems I see with solutions that are out there ready to be used. If you would like to continue the conversation, please shoot me an emailamelia@solutionsbyamelia.com.

Business Website www.solutionsbyamelia.com

Personal Blog: The Story Behind My Business

Twitter and Instagram @RN_Solutions