N!CA: Towards Digitalisation of Innovative Care Processes to Unburden and Empower Nurses

Demand for nursing care will intensify in the coming decades based on demographics, chronic diseases, multimorbidity and other health-related issues. Austrian nurses have a low job satisfaction and overall retention time in their job, due to high workloads. N!CA aims to unburden nurses by reducing the documentation burden and empower nurses by providing evidence-based decision support at the point of care at the right time. In three connected projects, the consortium works on 1) re-thinking and re-designing current nursing processes, 2) re-using existing RWD and 3) providing evidence-based digital decision support. Nursing processes in acute and long-term care are evaluated with respect to process duration, potential for simplification, automation, AI, decision support integration and patient involvement. Digital tools for patient involvement, AI-based personalized risk profiling, nursing care assessing, care dependency grading and decision support are investigated, tested and evaluated for their potential to unburden and empower nurses.