Information and Communication Technology: Design, Delivery, and Outcomes from a Nursing Informatics Boot Camp.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is integral in today’s healthcare as a critical piece of support to both track and improve patient and organizational outcomes. Facilitating nurses’ informatics competency development through continuing education is paramount to enhance their readiness to practice safely and accurately in technologically enabled work environments. In this article, we briefly describe progress in nursing informatics (NI) and share a project exemplar that describes our experience in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a NI educational event, a one-day boot camp format that was used to provide foundational knowledge in NI targeted primarily at frontline nurses in Alberta, Canada.

Assessing the charges associated with hematopoietic stem cell mobilization and remobilization in patients with lymphoma and multiple myeloma undergoing autologous hematopoietic peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.

Background: The purpose of this study was to perform a detailed analysis of the charges associated with chemomobilization and remobilization of autologous hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and to quantify medical costs and resource utilization associated with these procedures.

Study Design And Methods: Patients with lymphoma underwent chemomobilization with ifosfamide and etoposide with or without rituximab (IE ± R). Patients with multiple myeloma (MM) received a modified hyperfractionated cyclophosphamide, vincristine, doxorubicin, dexamethasone (hyper-CVAD) regimen after failing to mobilize with growth factors only.

Allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell collection as of 2008.

The rapid growth of the use of recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rhG-CSF) to mobilize and collect allogeneic peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) for transplantation has made it a new international standard. While the procedure remains safe, older donors, donors with significant comorbidities and pediatric donors are now often employed. This brings a new set of challenges in the donor evaluation, medical clearance, informed consent and collection process.

Extracorporeal photochemotherapy for the treatment of steroid-resistant chronic GVHD.

Chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is a major limitation of successful allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Extracorporeal photochemotherapy (ECP) has been tested extensively in small cohorts of patients with chronic GVHD. In this study, we retrospectively evaluated 71 patients with severe chronic GVHD treated with ECP.