By Robin Raiford, B.S.N., R.N., B.C., C.P.H.I.M.S.

Business Productivity Advisor

Microsoft Corporation

If you're a nurse manager or administrator, you can increase your team's operational efficiency, solve problems, and share information by using Office programs for tasks you do frequently.

In today's era of the nursing shortage, nurse managers and administrators constantly are being asked to do more with less. Nurse managers must quickly organize and transform data into knowledge, transform hours of work or analysis into minutes, and create and maintain budgets. They need to constantly check the status of issues, coordinate and maintain schedules of daily activities, and create meeting agendas and minutes. Nurse managers also oversee staff as they collaborate to create patient forms and educational materials that enhance the educational opportunities for patients. The number of responsibilities are remarkable.

These professionals' needs center on the ability to be detail-oriented and to show enhanced analytical skills and sharp organizational and communication skills. The work of nurses today demands problem-solving skills, as well as the ability to enliven learning with visual presentations (for example, by creating graphs for presentations that “tell all” at a glance).

The Microsoft Office family of products gives knowledge workers, such as nurse managers and administrators, the ability to import data, log and track issues, merge e-mails into a database, make graphs and templates, and provide online collaboration quickly — all elements of improved overall productivity. For example, nurses can collaborate to organize information for a company intranet before publishing to the Web, so that materials for patient education and staff education can be published in “ready to print” mode for the Web.

Office allows the nurse manager or administrator to create templates for reports and other documents. Many of the actions that are done in these reports — such as calculations or formatting — can be turned into automated processes using macros. These macros, once created, can maintain the work sequence, the process and steps which you use to complete a task, and allow the user the option to run them on demand. For example, some nurses have automated processes that allow them to show volume variance and do statistical data collection and analysis.

Here are a few of the ways in which nurse managers and administrators use Office products today to work more efficiently.

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About the Author Robin Raiford, B.S.N., R.N., B.C., C.P.H.I.M.S., has 25 years of nursing experience and has been in the informatics field for 12 years. She has extensive experience as a provider using an electronic medical record, a consultant, a CIS project manager, and a product specialist with an HIT vendor before she joined Microsoft Corporation as a Healthcare Enterprise - Business Productivity Advisor.