Development and evaluation of an integrated clinical nutrition management system for inpatients

Background Malnutrition is highly prevalent in hospitalized patients. Standardized nutritional interventions have been associated with improved clinical outcomes and reduced healthcare expenditures. Fragmented workflows, challenges in interdisciplinary coordination, and the absence of structured digital decision support often compromise the quality of nutritional care for hospitalized patients. Consequently, a dedicated information system that integrates nutrition data and decision support into routine workflows is critically needed. Objective To construct and evaluate a nutrition management module fully integrated into the Hospital Information System (HIS) to unify information flows and optimize the efficiency of clinical nutrition management. Methods Conduct surveys to identify issues within the clinical nutrition management system and analyze clinical needs. Assemble a multidisciplinary expert team to define system functionality and use cases. Translate the functional requirements into code and implement them as a modular application designed for subsequent expansion. Test and debug the system before embedding it into the HIS for deployment. After deployment, evaluate clinical utility through treatment data analysis, and assess software performance and user satisfaction via surveys. Results An integrated Clinical Nutrition Management System (CNMS) grounded in an integrative framework was successfully developed. The application adopts a modular design and covers the core steps of the nutritional-care pathway, from nutritional assessment through the prescription of parenteral and enteral nutrition to intake monitoring. Compared to the old system, the new module obtained higher user satisfaction scores (8.48 ± 1.21 vs. 6.70 ± 1.78). Users particularly praised the application’s visualization logic, medication list, real-time alerts, preset PN packages, and knowledge modules. Conclusion The application demonstrated acceptable usability and user satisfaction. Its logic-driven, workflow-integrated design pattern, combined with potential for scalability, holds promise for scaled interdisciplinary implementation. This system may support more structured nutrition management and workflow efficiency; however, its impact on clinical outcomes such as complications, length of stay, and mortality was not evaluated in this study and should be examined in future research.