Your Nursing Staff

One shift

What a nurse’s day looks like in LogBlues.

This is the day as the software actually has it, screen by screen. Nothing below is planned. It is what the app does today, written for the owner who has never watched a nurse use it and for the nurse who is about to.

You sign in as yourself. Every person in the practice has their own login and their own role. Yours says Nurse. A medical assistant’s says Clinical staff, and the two open the same screens. There are no shared passwords, so what you do is written under your name, and the screens you cannot use are not shown to you.

The day is one screen. The Schedule opens on today, one column per provider. A filter called Schedule view narrows it to All Staff, My Schedule or one provider. On the dashboard, the Today’s schedule card counts the visits and lists them, patients only, no staff meetings.

Check-in takes one screen. Under Patients, the Patient Check-In button opens it. You choose the patient, or add a new one, choose the provider, and type the reason for the visit. Vitals go in the same box: tap + BP, + HR, + Temp, + Weight or + SpO2 and type the number after it. The same screen asks, once, whether the patient may be texted, emailed, left a voicemail or recorded, and remembers the answer. Then Check in and start visit.

You walk them to a room, and the room is one tap. The clinic names its rooms once, under Settings › Owner & Admin Tools › Patient flow: Exam 1, Procedure, X-ray, whatever you call them. From then on check-in asks for a room, and leaving it on Waiting room means the patient waits. When you take them back, the Patient flow card on the dashboard has a Move to… menu on their row: pick the room. The rest is stamped for you. Typing the visit note marks them With provider. Completing the visit checks them out and frees the room. Each row shows the minutes, and at twenty minutes of waiting it says Delayed. Nothing routes anyone on its own; you stay in charge of the hallway. For the owner, the Reports screen shows for today how many patients each room saw, how long they waited and how long they were in the room.

The chart shows what you need first. A patient’s Overview holds three lists: Conditions, Medications and Allergies, each one editable. The tabs beside it are Visits & timeline, Care plan, Medications, Patient Notes, Files & results, Cases and Referrals. On the check-in screen, the allergies sit in a strip in red above the visit; until somebody has reviewed them the strip is amber and reads Allergies: not yet reviewed, and tapping it is how you review them. Anything an import brought in that nobody has read yet sits above the chart, so you know the chart is not the whole story before you read it.

Tasks land with a name and a time. New task asks for the task, the patient or work area, who it is Assigned to, an urgency of Critical or Routine, and a due date and time. When someone assigns a task to you, the bell in the top bar shows a New task assigned notice with its urgency; only Critical wears a badge, so Critical is easy to spot. The Tasks screen groups them by Urgency, by Date (Past due, Due today, Upcoming) or by Type, and the dashboard’s Tasks due card counts what is open. To close one, tick the box on its row and it moves to Completed; or open it, switch on Mark task as complete and press Save changes. A visit can leave a task behind too: the check-in screen has Assign a team task and Patient callback under the visit note.

The team is in Messages. One thread per person on the team for direct messages, a Whole Team Chat that everyone can read, and a Team Announcement thread for the things everyone must see. You can attach a file or an image, and an appointment has a Share in Messages button that drops it into a thread with an Open Schedule link. Older messages can be archived and brought back; the conversation itself is never deleted.

A form to hand a patient. The Forms library arrives stocked for your specialty, with the clinic’s letterhead, and each form can be printed, exported to PDF or emailed. For intake, the patient’s record has Send intake form: text message, email, or copy the link. LogBlues writes the message and the protected link; you send it from the clinic’s own texting or email app, and the patient opens it with their date of birth. If they filled in paper, Enter paper intake form types it into the record, and filing it puts the patient in the waiting room.

The emergency cart, inspected and signed. Under Inventory, the Emergency Carts tab keeps each cart with its location, its seal number and its contents, each linked to a stock item with a target quantity, so the cart knows when it is short. Inspecting it is a short checklist: the seal number, seal intact and matching the record, contents at target, medication and supply dates reviewed, emergency equipment ready, and notes. Saving writes a dated record with the name of the person signed in and a status of Ready or Needs attention, and if it is not ready a restock task appears on the spot, due tomorrow. The AED, the oxygen and anything else that must work on the day live under Compliance › Safety checks, each with a location, the days between checks and a next date; Mark checked today records today and moves the date, and fourteen days before a check falls due it says Check soon. The Nurse role reads all of this; ticking a check or saving an inspection takes inventory management access, which the practice decides who has.

Low stock tells you before the drawer is empty. Every item has its own reorder point. At or below it the item is marked Low, the Inventory screen counts the low items, and the dashboard’s Low stock card lists them under Below reorder point. A nurse can raise the order: Quick Re-Order suggests the quantity and Request order sends it up. Approving it stays with the owner or an administrator.

Spanish is one button. A translate button in the top bar switches LogBlues to Spanish, and back. Menus, navigation and the shared controls change; the patients, the schedule and the records do not, only the words around them. It is the practice’s setting rather than one person’s, so a clinic that works in Spanish sets it once. The same choice lives under Settings › Languages & Localization.

The hallway layout is built in. LogBlues runs on Windows today. Tablet and phone layouts are part of the same app: on a tablet the menu becomes a rail down the side, and on a phone it becomes a bar along the bottom with Dashboard, Patients, Schedule, Tasks and More. The Download page carries the schedule for the Android app.

The role

What the Nurse role can and cannot do.

LogBlues has ten roles across twenty-six permissions. The Nurse role holds fifteen of them. Clinical staff, the role for medical assistants, holds the same fifteen.

A nurse can:

• Open and edit patient records.
• Read and write clinical notes, and see results.
• Book, move and cancel appointments on the schedule.
• Create, assign and close tasks.
• Work cases and referrals.
• Use and edit forms.
• See and manage files, images and results.
• See inventory and raise an order request.
• Use Blues.
• Read and write in Messages.

A nurse cannot:

• Export clinical data out of the practice.
• Open Billing, or see the Reports screen.
• Add or remove staff, or change anyone’s role.
• Change security settings, backups or integrations, or read the security log.
• Permanently delete anything.
• Add stock, tick a safety check, or approve an order.
• Set up automations.

An administrator can switch individual screens off for one person beyond what the role allows. Those adjustments only ever take something away; to give a person more, the administrator changes their role. The roles page explains the whole model →

How we decide

How we decide what to build for nurses.

We structure the software around the nurse’s day, in the order the day happens, and we would rather hear about it from the person doing the work than guess. If something in that shift slows you down, or a step is missing, tell us what it is and what you do instead.

Tell us what slows you down →

Read next

Two pages that go with this one.

Every screen above is inside the same role model and the same encrypted workspace that our HIPAA compliance page describes, and the full list of what the app does is on the Features page.