Interview with Samu Mhlambi RN, BSN, MCiM – Inventor and CEO of ‘NurseBrain® Synapse’

Hi Samu – thanks for sharing your time with our readers. We are always interested in learning about applications that are using the Clinical Care Classification System. Maybe for context, could you tell us what is NurseBrain and how did you first get the idea?

NurseBrain® Synapse is nursing software I originally created to help nurses organize and make sense of everything happening with their patients during a shift. The idea came directly from my own experience at the bedside. Nurses are constantly assessing, prioritizing, completing tasks, documenting, and communicating, but those pieces are often scattered across different places.

The name reflects what I wanted the software to do. NurseBrain is about making nursing work more intuitive, and Synapse is about connecting the dots: the patient information, tasks, notes, care plans, and handoff that all belong to the same clinical picture.

Did you already know how to program when you started working on it?

No! I taught myself to program because I wanted NurseBrain to exist.

In a way, that became an advantage. I wasn’t starting with technology and looking for a nursing problem to solve. I was starting with problems I understood from being a nurse and learning enough technology to build what I wished I had at the bedside.

What led you to integrate the CCCS within NurseBrain?

What attracted me to the Clinical Care Classification System was how well it connects the pieces of nursing care.

Students learn the nursing process as ADPIE: assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. But when you’re first learning care plans, those pieces can feel like separate boxes on an assignment. CCC provides a standardized framework that connects nursing diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes, which made it a natural fit for what we were building.

We use CCC as the standardized foundation of our Care Plan Builder and tailor the experience to help students connect the terminology back to the nursing process. The goal isn’t just to help someone complete a care plan. It’s to help students understand why their assessment leads to a diagnosis, why that diagnosis leads to particular interventions, and how they evaluate whether those interventions worked.

If people want to try out NurseBrain, where do they go?

A great place to start, especially for nursing students, is our free Care Plan Builder (https://nursebrain.com/care-plans/ccc). We created a beginner-friendly guide that walks through how care plans, ADPIE, and CCC fit together, and then you can build one yourself right in your browser.

You have a background as a nurse with a Master’s in Clinical Informatics Management from Stanford and are now pursuing a DNP at Yale. What’s next?

The bigger question I’m pursuing is: How do we make nursing work more visible?

I’ve spent about 16 years in nursing, and the more I’ve studied informatics, healthcare systems, and nursing leadership, the more I’ve realized how much of what nurses actually do is fragmented or invisible in the technology around us.

That’s where I see NurseBrain going. I want to keep connecting the pieces of nursing work so we can better support how students learn to think like nurses, how practicing nurses manage care in real time, and eventually how healthcare organizations understand and support the work nurses are actually doing.

For me, NurseBrain has become the intersection of my clinical experience, my education, and the problems I want to spend my career working on.

Thanks again for the opportunity to share the story. I’m excited to see it come together!

Thanks Samu, we are excited to see where it goes!