The Patients workspace

What you’ll do

Open the Patients chip and meet the deck. A stack of patient cards you swipe through one at a time. Tap a card to open the full patient sheet. Double-tap to edit. The deck remembers your order, surfaces new admits to the front automatically, and keeps the rest one flick away.

Why nurses use this

A flat list buries the patient you actually need. You take report on six patients. By 0900 you’re on Bed 4. The EHR’s list is still sorted by room number. The Patients workspace puts the patient you’re working on at the front, with the rest one flick away. That’s how most shifts actually go: one patient at a time, not all at once.

How to get there

The Patients chip is the leftmost chip on the dashboard. It’s selected by default when you start a shift.

• From the dashboard: single tap the Patients chip if you’re on another tab.
• Direct link: open app.nursebrain.com/patient-list on web.
• Per-patient deep link: app.nursebrain.com/patient-timeline opens the timeline view of whichever patient you have selected.

Step-by-step

1. Land on the deck. Whichever patient is on the front is the one Synapse thinks you’re “on.” The next patient peeks behind. If you have one patient, that’s the only card; if you have six, you see one and the edge of the next.

2. Swipe to rotate. Swipe left or right to move the next patient to the front. Swipe fast to flip through a 6-patient assignment quickly.

3. Tap to open the sheet. Tap the front card. It expands into a near-full-screen sheet with all the patient’s details, timeline, and actions. Pull down or tap outside to dismiss.

4. Double-tap to edit. Skips the sheet, opens the edit form directly. Use this when you just need to change one field. Code status, allergy, isolation precaution. Without scrolling the whole sheet.

5. Switch to Previous patients when you need them. Single tap the active Patients chip to open the menu, then tap “Previous.” The deck reloads with discharged/inactive patients. Tap “Current patients” to switch back.

6. Add a new patient. Double-tap the Patients chip. The form opens. New patients land at the front of the deck automatically. Synapse rotates the new admit to the top so you don’t have to scroll for the patient you just added. See adding a patient for the three ways to do it.

Tips from the floor

• Auto-rotation on add is a real time-saver. When report drops a new admit on you mid-shift and you add them, they appear on top of the deck. Not at the bottom of a list you have to scroll to.
• The deck remembers the order you put it in. If you spent 0700 organizing your patients in the order you want to round on them, the deck keeps that order.
• Previous patients isn’t gone. It’s a tab. End-of-shift cleans Current. Previous keeps the discharges visible if you need to grab a stat from someone who left earlier.
• The sheet grows out of the card. The card expands in place rather than page-changing. That’s intentional. Your eye tracks the same card the whole time, which keeps you oriented when you’re tired.
• There’s something hidden on a long-press. Try it sometime. Just not in front of the charge nurse.

Common questions

What’s the limit on patients? There’s no hard cap. The deck handles a typical med-surg assignment (4–6) comfortably; ICU pairs (1–2) and step-down (3–4) are obviously fine. If you’re carrying 7+ patients, that’s a staffing conversation, not a Synapse one.

Can I see all patients in a list view? Not currently. The deck is intentional. See “Why nurses use this” above. If a list view is something you’d actually use day-to-day, send feedback from Settings; we revisit this every few months.

What happens to a patient at end-of-shift? End-shift moves all current patients to Previous, unless you’re on a Long-Term Care specialty (which has continuity beyond a single shift). You can re-add a previous patient to the current shift from the Previous view.

Can I share a patient with another nurse? Yes. See QR handoff. Generate a QR code on your patient, the oncoming nurse scans it, the patient lands on their deck.

Does the patient sheet show vitals from the EHR? No. Synapse is your brain sheet, not a chart. The vitals on the sheet are the ones you put there.

I tapped a patient card by accident. Did I do anything? No. Tapping opens the sheet; tapping outside or pulling down dismisses it. Nothing’s edited unless you double-tap or open the edit form.

Where this fits in your shift

The Patients workspace is the spine of every shift. It’s where report becomes data, where mid-shift updates live, and where handoff starts. The Tasks workspace is the parallel surface for the things you have to do for these patients; the Notes workspace is for the things you need to remember. All three use the same gestures. See the three swipes.