Your first shift on Synapse

What you’ll do

You’ll run a two-minute onboarding chat, land on the Welcome screen, rate your energy and how your body feels, and tap Start Shift. Then you add your first patient. By the time report finishes you’ve got a card on the deck and a few tasks already on the list.

Why nurses use this

You walked in at 0645 with coffee and a head full of yesterday’s shift. Report starts in fifteen minutes and you don’t have time to learn anything that calls itself an app. Synapse knows this. The first-time flow is built to get you from “never seen this thing” to “patient saved” inside five minutes, without a tour or a tutorial nobody asked for.

How to get there

Install Synapse and open it. The flow walks you through everything below, in order. No menu to find, no setup wizard to skip.

• iOS / Android: App Store or Play Store, install, open.
• Web: app.nursebrain.com. Same flow on a browser.
• Guest first: a “Continue as guest” link on the login screen lets you poke around without making an account. You can convert later and the patients you added come with you.

Step-by-step

1. Sign up or sign in. Email, Apple, or Google.

2. Onboard with the chat. The first time you open Synapse it asks who you are. Name, role, specialty, locale. It’s a chat, not a form. Type your answers the way you’d answer a new coworker who asked the same things. The AI uses what you tell it to pick the templates that match your unit. You can’t back out of the chat; it’s deliberately short, and the answers shape every form that comes after.

3. Land on the Welcome screen and rate the pre-shift questions. This is where every Synapse shift starts. Two smiley-face Likert rows: “How’s your energy level?” and “How do you feel physically?” Tap a smiley for each. Start Shift stays greyed out until both rows are answered. The numbers feed a longitudinal resilience picture you’ll see weeks from now; the act of pausing for ten seconds before the shift is half the point.

4. Tap Start Shift. That’s the moment the shift window opens. Every task you add from now until you End Shift gets tagged to this shift, and the end-of-shift tally counts the work against that window. You land on the dashboard with the Patients chip selected.

5. Add your first patient. Double-tap the Patients chip. The Omni form opens, and it isn’t twelve fields. It’s one big text area where you describe the patient. Type, or tap the mic and talk through it: “Bed 4, 72-year-old male, chest pain admit overnight, troponin pending, allergies penicillin.” Synapse parses what it needs out of that paragraph. If you’d rather have the structured four-step SBAR layout (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation), there’s an affordance on the form to switch to it.

6. Save. The patient lands on the front of your deck. One card to swipe through, and you’ve already used the muscle-memory move (double-tap a chip). Add the rest of your assignment the same way.

Tips from the floor

• Don’t skip the onboarding chat. It’s 90 seconds, and the specialty answer is what decides which template the SBAR form loads. Skip it and you’ll spend the next month wondering why your fields look wrong.
• Guest mode is real. Try Synapse on tonight’s shift before deciding anything. The whole product is there; only cross-device persistence (care plan PDF export, QR import of a patient) needs an account. Convert from guest to a real account on the same device and keep your data.
• The two pre-shift smileys aren’t optional. Start Shift is greyed out until you tap one in each row. You’ll resent it on day one and appreciate it in two months when the resilience chart shows you exactly when your energy started drifting down.
• Use demo data while you’re learning. “Bed 4, 72yo M, chest pain admit.” Don’t put real names and MRNs in until the gestures are muscle memory.
• Synapse remembers where you were. Swipe to the Tasks workspace, come back tomorrow, you land where you left off. State persists across launches.

Common questions

Do I need to sign up to try Synapse? No. “Continue as guest” gets you the dashboard, the patient deck, and the Brain Sheet Builder. The only things that need an account are features that have to follow you across devices: care plan PDF export, QR import of a patient. We’ll prompt you in the moment if you hit one of those.

Is Synapse free? The Brain Sheet Builder is free forever. The full clinical workflow (Brain AI, Care Plan Builder, QR import, dictation, routines, historical stats) is on a 7-day trial, then a subscription. The exact list is in free vs trial vs paid.

Can I use Synapse on my hospital iPad? You can, but install it on a personal device too. The app is meant to be the brain sheet in your scrubs pocket, and a shared hospital tablet is the wrong shape for that.

My hospital doesn’t allow personal phones on the unit. Can I still use Synapse? Yes, through the web app. app.nursebrain.com runs on any hospital workstation, so you can drive the same dashboard from a unit computer. Same patients, same tasks, same notes as the phone version. Pre and post-shift work (the Brain Sheet Builder, planning, reviewing your stats) you can do from whatever device you have at home.

If your unit wants Synapse formally approved for clinical use, NurseBrain offers institutional licensing. Email support@nursingbrain.app and we’ll send materials your management can review.

What if I’m on the wrong specialty? Change it in Settings any time. Specialty drives which template the SBAR form loads. Switch to ICU and the fields swap to ICU questions without losing patients.

What about my hospital’s EHR? Synapse sits next to the chart, not in it. Some orgs have FHIR sync turned on; if yours does, you’ll see an integration card on the dashboard. If not, treat Synapse as your brain sheet, not your chart.

Do I have to add patients one at a time? No. Dictation is faster: hold the mic, describe a patient, save. Or import via QR if the off-going nurse is also on Synapse. See adding a patient.

Where this fits in your shift

This is the door. Every other guide assumes you’ve done the first onboarding chat and tapped Start Shift at least once. Read the three swipes next; that’s the gesture grammar the rest of the app is built on. Then the Patients workspace so the card deck stops feeling new.