She Saves 30 Minutes per Patient with Arena Mobile

“This is a solution that has completely changed my workday. With Arena Mobile I experience being in flow, and thanks to everything I can do in the app along the way, I save several hours of administrative work every single day,” says Slotfeldt.

Previously, she was dependent on access to a computer to do her job and felt like a bottleneck for patients and colleagues. Much of a hospital’s workflow depends on physicians’ decisions and documentation, yet in practice there has not been enough time allocated for documentation to be done continuously. This is especially true in an emergency department, where doctors are constantly required to move on to the next patient.

“The backlog is one thing, but the worst part is knowing that you are the reason vulnerable patients end up waiting unnecessarily long. Before, a patient could remain in the emergency department for several hours simply because I hadn’t had the time to write the treatment plan. You know your colleagues get extra work, and you go home after a 15-hour shift feeling that you weren’t enough,” she explains.

Slotfeldt shares that she began to feel powerless in a system that made it increasingly difficult for her to be the kind of hospital physician she wanted to be. But then the “Arena Mobile” app appeared on her work phone.

“This is a solution that has completely changed my workday. With Arena Mobile I experience being in flow, and thanks to everything I can do in the app along the way, I save several hours of administrative work every single day.”

On a regular shift, Dr. Bianca Fiorentino Slotfeldt estimates that she saves about 30 minutes of administrative time per patient when using Arena Mobile. On a typical shift, that adds up to around four hours of work saved—every single day!

About Bianca:

Bianca Fiorentino Slotfeldt is half Norwegian and half American and grew up in California. She eventually realized that she would not be able to finance a medical education in the United States.

To fulfill her dream of becoming a physician, she first moved to Norway to learn the language and then moved to Hungary to study medicine. After completing her studies, she was offered a position as a physician in specialization in England but turned it down to pursue a career in Norway. She is now a resident physician at Stavanger University Hospital, specializing in cardiology.

After discovering the Arena Mobile app, Bianca Fiorentino Slotfeldt took the initiative to create the lecture “The Hospital in Your Pocket” to show other physicians the opportunities that come with using the mobile app. Here she is on stage during the DIPS Forum in June 2025.

Saving 30 Minutes per Patient

Slotfeldt is employed at the Department of Cardiology at Stavanger University Hospital, and on her path to becoming a cardiologist she rotates between the ward, the outpatient clinic, and the emergency department. She has independently taken the initiative to get as many doctors as possible to start using Arena Mobile.

“Physicians spend 40–50 percent of their workday on record-keeping and administrative tasks. This everyday reality tied to administration and documentation is not an IT problem: it is a systemic issue with substantial patient safety implications —and it costs more than we think,” she emphasizes. Slotfeldt has done calculations in her own workday and concluded that on a normal shift she saves about 30 minutes per patient when she uses the Arena Mobile app.

She explains that including documentation time, she normally spends between 70 and 90 minutes of work per patient when not using Arena Mobile. During a regular shift with responsibility for eight patients it means she saves about four hours daily when using Arena Mobile!

Gatekeepers of Patient Flow

“In the past I could have shifts where I had no access to a computer for five hours, and I would end up with an administrative backlog that I often had to finish after working hours just to catch up. The worst part of this backlog was the stress I felt because so many people were waiting on my documented decisions,” Slotfeldt explains.

She knows that many physicians still face the same challenge:

“If you want to create real change in healthcare, you have to reach the doctors! Physicians are the gatekeepers of the entire patient flow. The difference between me sending a referral at 9:15 AM instead of 2:15 PM—when I might finally have computer access and time—can mean the patient is spared one, two, or even three hospital days.” She has herself experienced patients who remained hospitalized for two extra weeks simply because a physician’s decision was missing

Most interventions are not based on a single decision, but rather doctors make more than a hundred decisions, big and small, every single day, and a delay in any of these have ripple effects throughout the rest of the patient pathway  “Even the simplest measures require medical approval, and the physician is not always available. Every decision we make triggers a chain of events. We are involved in starting, adjusting, and concluding treatment pathways. The patient record is the centralized account of our clinical reasoning, and justification of our assessments and decisions. What we write must be verifiable both professionally and legally afterwards, as well as allow the next physician to take over the patient without loss of information in the process” she explains. 

These interdependencies, combined with a lack of suitable tools to facilitate real-time collaboration and unrealistic allocation of time in a day to comply with the ever-increasing documentation requirements became increasingly frustrating.

No matter where she is—in the elevator, on her way to or from the outpatient clinic, in the brief seconds before a meeting starts, in every spare moment, what used to be considered “dead time”—Dr. Bianca Fiorentino Slotfeldt now carries out administrative medical tasks through Arena Mobile.

Transforming Everyday Work

Slotfeldt takes a short pause and declares:

“But now there is hope! Arena Mobile is a solution that has completely transformed my everyday work!”

Bianca Fiorentino Slotfeldt has an above-average interest in technology and firmly believes that technology can help give physicians “time back.” The time that various IT systems have stolen in recent years—because of functions that “only take one extra minute”—can once again be used for presence and professionalism.

“DIPS Arena has laid the tracks and is leading the way for everything that comes next. For example, DIPS has developed an impressive AI solution for automatic speech-to-summary, but we probably won’t be able to use it before 2027. The pilot started this fall,” she says.

“Just think how much could be solved simply by making proper use of the tools that have already been developed!”