Tuesday, July 15, 2008

SINI starts tomorrow

SINI (aka Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics) starts tomorrow at the University of Maryland. The hi-blogs.info group will have coveritlive sessions during the conference.

If you're even remotely interested in informatics, be sure to check it out.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Never assume...

That was my lesson this week. I work with a lot of very experienced nurses who know a lot of things. I found out this week that many of them do not know how to use many of the office automation tools we have access to on our computers.

Case in point, one nurse needed help dealing with attachments in Outlook. Another needed information on how to open attached PDFs and fill them out. Still another needed help troubleshooting what was going wrong with her e-mail.

We have an assigned support person (who, incidentally has another job besides user support) but she's on vacation. As a result, yours truly got to be the support tech on the floor. I don't mind it at all, but it does show how technology skills are being thought of as natural requirements, especially for new nurses, most of whom, have worked with technology during their entire nursing school experience. Happily, our hospital system is recognizing the need for additional computer training for both nurses and ancillary staff and is making it available to those who wish to utilize it.

Here are a few articles of note on this subject.

A new definition for nursing informatics (from AdvanceWEB)
This editorial describes the field of nursing informatics.

This article, The impact of information technology on nursing practice and knowledge by Melanie Anne Cox was featured in a book called Consumer-Centered Computer-Supported Healthcare for Healthy People.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Telehealth and the VA

In this age of rising fuel and healthcare costs, telehealth is becoming more important.

The VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) health system is using telehealth both for convenience and greater access to care for US military veterans. The Office of Care Coordination discusses the various telehealth initiatives of the VA.

Here is some feedback about the VA's telehealth model: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9491&page=1

Tech in the news

Here are a couple of interesting articles in the news of interest to nurses.

Microsoft is targeting nurses for versions of its online applications (from http://www.bloomberg.com/ 7/8/08)

On another older note, Microsoft talks about the role of nurses and technology.
Nurses want technology that works the way they do