Mobile decision support for advanced practice nurses.

Mobile Decision Support for Advanced Practice Nurses (MODS-APN) is a PDA-based decision support tool designed to assist APNs in the diagnosis and management of smoking cessation, obesity, and depression. It is currently being tested in a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) in a sample of APN students to determine the effect on adherence to clinical practice guideline (CPG) recommendations. Tools such as MODS-APN have the potential to increase CPG adherence, enhance evidence-based practice, promote patient safety, and in the long term improve patient outcomes.

Usefulness of a personal digital assistant-based advanced practice nursing student clinical log: Faculty stakeholder exemplars.

The number of health sciences educational programs that are integrating personal digital assistants (PDAs) into their curricula is on the rise. In this paper, we report an evaluation of the usefulness of a PDA-based advanced practice nursing (APN) student clinical log through faculty stakeholder exemplars in three areas: pediatric asthma care; procedures of Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (NP) students; and diagnostic and screening procedures of Women's Health NP students. We generated descriptive data through routine queries and through custom SQL queries at the request of a specific faculty member who wished to examine a particular aspect of an educational program.

Promoting patient safety through informatics-based nursing education.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Quality of Health Care in America identified the critical role of information technology in designing safe and effective health care. In addition to technical aspects such as regional or national health information infrastructures, to achieve this goal, healthcare professionals must receive the requisite training during basic and advanced educational programs. In this article, we describe a two-pronged strategy to promote patient safety through an informatics-based approach to nursing education at the Columbia University School of Nursing: (1) use of a personal digital assistant (PDA) to document clinical encounters and to retrieve patient safety-related information at the point of care, and (2) enhancement of informatics competencies of students and faculty.

Informatics competencies pre-and post-implementation of a Palm-based student clinical log and informatics for evidence-based practice curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation and evaluation of a two-part approach to achieving informatics competencies: 1) Palm-based student clinical log for documentation of patient encounters; and 2) informatics for evidence-based practice curriculum. Using a repeated-measures, non-equivalent control group design, self-reported informatics competencies were rated using a survey instrument based upon published informatics competencies for beginning nurses. For the class of 2002, scores increased significantly in all competencies from admission to graduation.