a nurse tends to patients Epic
gets
acuity

March 30, 2026 -- Epic is catching up to us! In a recent posting, they describe their algorithm (and how to use it) for calculating a patient's acuity and assigning nursing workloads accordingly. They call it the Assignment Wizard.

We built a method for this 14 years ago, and described it here.

What is nursing workload and how is it quantified? For a given nurse, it's the sum of all that nurse's patients' acuities. What is a patient's acuity? Why do we need to know it? It's a measure of how much care a patient requires. We need to know it because in order to do effective nurse staffing, we must know how much work each patient represents for each nurse. We need a metric.

How do we measure acuity? The concept is simple but in practice objective measurement is complex. A commonly-used measure is anticipated time to discharge. Another is a point system in which points are added for patient care requirements that add to the nurse's workload. These are things like central lines, ventilator, mobility limitations, comorbidities, and so on.

The problem with the conventional measures is that they are crude. They do not provide accurate metrics. Most importantly, they are not dynamic; they are not easily updated as patient status changes, new orders are received, and other changes occur that impact nursing workload.

Our NurseMind app provides a precise and planning-oriented definition of acuity: how many minutes of work are required by a patient of a nurse at any given moment. Acuity rises as tasks are added to the nurse's list and falls as they are checked off. It goes to zero when the patient is discharged or transferred.

Epic is inching toward (re-)inventing this algorithm... which we've championed for a decade.

Go NurseMind!