From nurse education to bedside nursing, nursing is experiencing an electronic makeover. Eighty seven percent of nursing schools now use high-fidelity mannequins to bring various levels of simulation to their students. Prescriber orders, previously written on paper, are now entered into a comprehensive electronic ordering system.
Three articles in the summer 2011 issue of Johns Hopkins Nursing explore the new technologies used to enhance the quality of education and care and how nurses play active and vital roles in the development and implementation of innovative health information systems.
The issue's lead feature article, "Virtual Reality," examines the use of simulation in the nursing curriculum and how this tantalizing approach provides benefits to students and schools. Combined with students' desires for the applied learning opportunities simulation provides, administration, financial, and staffing concerns are pushing nursing schools to view simulation as more than an adjunct to teaching. It is being recognized as an experiential learning tool perhaps as valuable as the traditional gold standard of nursing education: clinical time spent with patients in the hospital.
"Health Info in the Digital Age," focuses on the many roles nurses play in the development of innovative health information systems including the electronic health record, a one-stop documentation system that fosters safer handoffs, communication between providers, informed decisions, accurate discharge plans, and other benefits.
"High-Tech Nursing" takes a close look at the successful team of five Nurse Informatics Specialists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who ensure that the hospital's health information technology supports patient care and quality outcomes. The article highlights how each individual's skills, experience, and enthusiasm to lead new projects is enabling the hospital to achieve its goal of designing and implementing systems that enable high-quality, safe, efficient, effective, equitable, and timely, patient/family-centered care.
UofL receives two federal grants to help increase Kentuckians' access to health care