Unburdening and empowering nursing staff through the use of digitalization – This approach is being pursued by both scientific and business partners as part of the N!CA COMET project at the Medical University of Graz.
N!CA has set the goal of rethinking old processes and structures, breaking them down, and relieving and empowering nursing staff with digital support. The empowerment of nursing staff in their professional skills will be researched and established, if possible, supported by digitalization.
To achieve this goal, five scientific and six company partners from Austria and Switzerland have teamed up to cover the entire value chain, from early research to technical development and application in clinical practice. This creates the opportunity to support the joint research and development program based on the modern and innovative research expertise of the scientific partners and the technical and digital expertise of the participating corporate partners and healthcare providers.
"We are pursuing various research goals with N!CA - the main one is to reduce the time spent on (nursing) documentation. In this way, we want to create more time for direct contact between nursing staff and patients".
Katharina Lichtenegger, Project leader
COMET is the red-white-red flagship program of business and science communities to promote top-level research. It promotes the establishment of competence centers for excellent technologies. The COMET project N!CA pursues the overall goal of relieving the burden on nursing staff by reducing (nursing) documentation efforts and simultaneously empowering them by providing them with tools that enable evidence-based decision-making at the point of care at the right time. Outdated processes and structures are to be broken up so that (nursing) documentation can be more precise, evidence-based and efficient in the future - which in turn increases the quality of care.
FFG funding and services enable risky innovative projects with various partners between science and industry. The funding programs are financed by the Republic of Austria - specifically the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy (BMAW) - but also by participating federal states as well as companies and research organizations. The COMET project N!CA is funded with a total project volume of EUR 2.83 million.
