Healthcare IT News - September 2008 - (Page 43) www.HealthcareITNews.com clinicAl toolkit September 2008 ■ Healthcare iT News 43 tion has washed over the healthcare workplace. That irony isn’t lost on Patricia Abbott, a nurse and co-director of the PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing Knowledge, Information Management and Sharing at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. By John Andrews, Contributing Editor “As the use of informatics and IT have s it continues to permeate the healthcare industry, information become more common in the workplace, it technology has become a critical tool has become more obvious to me as an eduin helping medical professionals do their cator that we need to look at ways to better jobs. But it has become much more than prepare nurses for the work environment,” just a conduit for data. It has evolved into Abbott said. “I had been trying to start an automation program a few years an instrument for cultural “if you don’t before I came to Johns Hopkins change within the hospital environment. like change, you’ll but the market wasn’t mature Specifically, nursing inforlike irrelevancy enough. I was teaching assessments and other task-oriented matics has cast a long shadow even less.” things but not the key element over the caregiving field, serv– Patricia Abbott – how to thrive in an informaing as the catalyst for a gradtion-rich environment.” ual transition from manual to It wasn’t until she connected with forautomated practices. With that shift comes a dramatic change in the way clinicians – nurses mer colleague Jim Cato from Atlanta-based Eclipsys in 2005 that the wheels of change especially – approach their jobs. IT is a profound influence that is now start- started to gain traction. “Patti and I started to brainstorm and from ing to enter other phases of nursing, the most noteworthy being at the academic level. Yet that we created an academic partnership and nurse vocational training has largely remained a working model designed to re-engineer the stubbornly steeped in conventional, paper- way nurses learn,” said Cato, a nurse who based methods while the electronic revolu- serves as vice president and chief nursing officer for Eclipsys. “We made a business case for it, invited key faculty members to meet with the executive team, did the presentaTHE UNIVERSITY OF tion. They liked it and gave us the approval LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE to move forward.” The transformational process centered on The Acadian Ambulance/BORSF Chair steering the curriculum away from paperbased practices to automated IT systems. in Telehealth: At first, “old school” faculty members were The University of Louisiana at Lafayette invites reluctant to convert their established pronominations and applications for the Endowed grams into something foreign to them. Then Chair in Telehealth. The applicant must have something remarkable happened, Cato said. an earned doctorate in a medical or informa“For the instructors who were receptive to tion systems-related field. Successful applithe idea, we let the magic happen,” he said. cants must also have a strong record of public “As a result, the more resistant faculty memand extramural funding. The holder of the chair bers got caught up in the excitement of it.” must also have the academic qualifications for The greatest value of the program – as well a tenured or tenure-track faculty appointment at as its biggest reason for opposition – is the the rank of Associate Professor or Professor. way it creates new ways for nurses to think about their approach to the job, Abbott said. IT is changing nurses’ approach to work Informatics systems shape training, inter-hospital communications. A Nurses in training at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing are being exposed daily to a caring approach that employs informatics and learning how to thrive in an information-rich environment. She concedes that “change is tough” and that it’s understandable why veteran instructors wouldn’t want to make radical modifications to their teaching methods near the end of their careers. Still, she justifies the switchover by telling holdouts: “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevancy even less.” Former national IT czar David Brailer got a tour of the training lab and reportedly came away impressed, declaring the program a “model for the future.” The enthusiasm has spread to the Johns Hopkins medical school staff, which wants to implement a similar program at their facility, said Peter Greene, chief medical information officer. “There is a big gap between physician documentation and nursing documentation and we want to bring those together,” Greene said. “We want to make sure everyone understands the common plan for managing the patient.” So far the medical school initiative lacks a champion, the individual responsible for selling peers on the program. “There isn’t a hesitancy from the faculty, but we need the right experts,” Greene said. “We’re probing.” Strengthening ‘hAnd-offS’ Another key development in nursing informatics concerns improving patient safety and one vendor, Knoxville, Tenn.based White Stone Group, has addressed it through a telecommunications application called OptiVox. Designed to automate the often time-intensive, error-prone “hand-off ” process between nursing shifts, OptiVox is a system that allows nurses to communicate using recorded messages created by phone or computer. When preparing for a hand-off, the outgoing nurse enters voice messages by responding to a series of prompts covering all necessary components of each patient’s condition. The receiving nurse listens to the hand-off by phone or computer and then verifies information by asking any remaining questions. The Joint Commission has identified communication breakdown as the main culprit behind medical errors, causing up to 70 percent of sentinel events. Among the most common errors: lack of preparation when receiving a patient; differing interpretations of a nursing see page 44 The University is a Doctoral Research University (high research activity) public institution located in Lafayette, the heart of French Louisiana and a very pleasant and exciting place to live. It has an enrollment of approximately 16,000 students with a faculty of 550 and serves as the base of Louisiana’s off-shore industry, as well as the financial, retail, and medical center for South-Central Louisiana. Starting date: The search committee will review applications and continue until the position is filled; however, submission of materials by January 15, 2009 is strongly encouraged. Candidates should send a letter of application, current vita and transcript, and three letters of reference to: Carol Venable, Department Head Health Information Management The University of Louisiana at Lafayette P.O. Box 41007 Lafayette, LA 70504-1007 Tel: 337-482-6629 ~ Fax: 337-482-5902 venable@louisiana.edu EEO#: SC 2-07 Promote your open top-level positions through targeted RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING Just $39 per line and starting at $290 per column inch. Please call for display rates. Healthcare IT News is the most highly circulated healthcare IT publication in the market. 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