Rounds: Nurse Shift Tracker

No accounts. No cloud. No ads. Rounds doesn't even have permission to use the internet — so nothing you type on shift can go anywhere but your own pocket.

I'm a bedside nurse with ADHD, which is a genuinely bad combination on a busy floor. A shift throws off more small timed tasks than I can hold in my head, and the ones that slip are never the ones you'd have chosen to drop.

For years my answer was a paper brain sheet — scribbled at 0700, folded into a scrub pocket, and no help at all at 1400 when the recheck was actually due.

Rounds is that brain sheet, except it keeps time for you. I built it for me first, which is why it works the way it does: reminders that make a noise instead of sitting quietly as a badge you'll notice at 1530. A list that lives outside your head so you're not spending working memory guarding it. And a screen that tells you plainly when there's genuinely nothing due, because "am I forgetting something?" is its own kind of exhausting.

WHAT IT DOES

• Set up your unit once. Your tasks, your timings. Every patient you admit after that starts from your setup — not someone else's idea of a shift.

• Timed checks that actually go off. Real alarms at the real time, not a quiet badge you'll notice three hours later.

• Add a condition, get its checks. Magnesium, epidural, GBS, a fresh post-op — the timing comes with it, and you can change any of it.

• Deliveries handled. Record a delivery and the labour reminders stop, the postpartum ones start, and you don't have to think about the switchover in the middle of everything else.

• A timeline of what you actually did, in case report goes sideways.

• PIN lock, so a phone left on the counter stays shut.

Seven units, each with its own starting task list: Labor & Delivery, Postpartum, Antepartum, Med-Surg, ED, ICU, and Telemetry.

ABOUT YOUR PATIENTS' PRIVACY — THE SHORT VERSION

There is no field for a patient's name. There isn't going to be one. Patients are a room label and a cartoon avatar, and that's deliberate.

Rounds has no accounts, no cloud, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no ads. It does not have permission to use the internet at all. That isn't a promise in a policy somewhere — it's in the app's manifest, and your phone enforces it. Nothing you type can leave your device, because there is nowhere for it to go and no way to send it.

Uninstall the app and it's all gone. There's no copy anywhere, because there was never anywhere to put one.

Some fields let you type free text. Please don't type patient names into them. Whatever your workplace's rules about protected health information are, they apply here too.

WHAT ROUNDS IS NOT

Rounds is not a medical device and it is not clinical decision support. It doesn't tell you what care to give, it doesn't interpret anything, and it isn't a substitute for your own judgement, your unit's policies, or the chart. It keeps track of your tasks and reminds you when you asked to be reminded. That's the whole job.

It's also not a documentation system. Nothing in Rounds goes in the record.

THE PRICE

Free to download and use. No ads, no subscription, and nothing about you is for sale — "nothing leaves your phone" and "we sell your data" can't both be true, and I picked the first one.

Nothing due right now? Good. Go drink some water.