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The Columbia University School of Nursing integrates informatics competencies into their curriculum. They do not really try and train advanced practice nurses to be informatics professionals, but they do believe that every nurse should have a set of informatics to go along with the clinical excellence that Columbia School of Nursing is become known for.
Our particular project came about from the perspective of really wanting to integrate Informatics competencies in to the curriculum. So, not wanting to, necessarily, train nurses, advanced practice nurses, to be informatics professional, but my firm belief that every nurse needs to have a set of informatics competencies to go along with the clinical excellence that Columbia has been long renowned for. So, we set about, in a series of projects, in informatizing the advanced practiced nursing curriculum. From the perspective of wanting our nurses to practice with the best evidence at the point of care and also being able to document their clinical encounters. So, in addition to starting with some content in the curriculum, teaching them content about the use of decision support tools and how to retrieve information for evidence based practice we developed, for the personal digital assistant, a custom program that allowed the advanced practice nurses to document their clinical encounters as they were taking care of patients. So, it was very important to us to be able to understand what it was that our students were doing in this particular community. We wanted them to be able to look at their own practice over time, but also to have the faculty be able to monitor the students practice and to be able to benchmark an individual students practice against that of the other students in their specialty program.
Now with having students do the data entry to document their practices on the PDA, were able to aggregate that data to give the students their individual reports so they can see how they progress over time. To give you an instance, one of the things we do for our acute care nurse practitioners is we keep track of the procedures that they do and whether they do the procedure, whether they observe a procedure, whether they do it with supervision or whether they do it independently. So this way, both the student and the faculty member can look at that skill acquisition over time and help to determine what remaining skills the students should get before the time of their graduation.
From our perspective, we want the advanced practice nurses, who complete their educational program at the Columbia University School of Nursing, to not only be excellent clinically, but also to have a set of informatics competencies that assures that they can use, not necessarily, the tools that we've developed but similar tools in their practice. We feel strongly that this is very important to ensure patient safety; secondly, to deliver the highest standard of care; and third, for them to be able to work more efficiently. We feel it's important that they, that we prepare people during their educational years so that they can then take these competencies forward into their clinical environments. One of the things that we find as a result of this is, in fact, the students are much more likely, when they are considering their jobs post graduation that they really looked towards working in an institution that will have better information support than in one that doesn't. And part of this is because theyve learned the potential value of these tools as part of their educational curriculum.
One of the issues that always occurs when, in health care, when you're talking about a computer and its role in the patient provider interaction, and, so you can get into situations where people see the computer as a barrier between the provider, that is the nurse, and the patient. But, in fact, our philosophy is you use the information technology as an extension of the nurses expertise and that they need to become comfortable using the technology in the presence of the patient.
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12:14The Future of Nursing Informatics Part 1 - Group 4by ledie4854 views
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