IT items of note

Here are a few interesting articles of note from the internet.

Nurse reflects on decades of caring (from www.citizen.com in Lavonia, NH)
A unique perspective on nursing and technology in today's environment

Nurses face a digital divide (from www.nursezone.com)

And for something a little different...
Cadets trade the trenches for firewalls (from www.nytimes.com)

Gadgets galore

The latest smartphone out there is the Palm Pre. While it's not out on the market yet, if you'd like to try out this technology and talk about it, you get a free six-month subscription and a Pre.

Check out this offer on the official Palm blog.

New product from Unbound Medicine

The Handbook of Nursing Diagnosis by Lynda Juall Carpenito-Moyet, RN, MSN,CRNP was a very popular tool for me in nursing school. This little book has lots of nursing diagnosis information in it and is now available in electronic format.

Get it from Unbound for your Palm, iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile enabled device at www.unboundmedicine.com

More on Twitter

Lo and behold, I get a great bunch of links from my listservs. Here are a few of the gems noted below.

How to Safely Blend Personal and Professional from www.cio.com

How to Search Twitter Smarter also from www.cio.com

Tweet, twitter...what?

If you're overcome by anxiety because you don't know what those two words mean, they refer to one of the most talked about internet tools right now...Twitter. There's even a really great YouTube video on how Twitter works called "Twitter in Plain English".

Many folks with blogs, such as yours truly, also maintain Twitter feeds, which allow posts of 140 characters or less. Distilling posts down to 140 characters can be tricky, though. Since I don't own an iPhone and since I don't always have wifi access for my Palm, I'm currently staying out of the Twitter realm for this blog. Frankly, my day-to-day life may be exciting, but some of my stuff I can't tell you. It's five letters and starts with an H----...and it's not HORSE, but rather HIPAA.

The good folks at Clinical Cases and Images, though, are right in the fray. Here are a few of their thoughts on what's going on with medical blogging and Twitter.

In the news

Joint health record for DoD and the VA:
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/obama-announces-new-joint-health-record-dod-va

An interesting article about the demand for clinicians with informatics experience:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/jobs/12starts.html

News items of note

Yes, I'm still here but busy working and prepping for every kind of test you can imagine.

Here are a few news items I've culled of interest in IT. Note: not all of them pertain directly to your life on the floor as an RN, but they tell the background story of the world of IT right now.

Think they can't outsource health care? Think again. Infosys, one of the largest IT outsourcing shops in the world is looking at taking on the US health care market (from the WSJ Health Blog.)
President Obama discusses the importance of IT in health care yet again.

Emerging Technologies in Nurse Education is a seminar sponsored by Reed Elsevier, primarily for nursing educators. It brings up some very interesting topics, particularly use of simulator tools for nursing students.

GeekDoctor brings up another hot IT topic: Green IT. Green IT discusses ways of saving energy in the use of IT equipment by powering down servers and workstations when they are not in use. This can be better said than done in a 24/7/365 health care environment, and GeekDoctor highlights some interesting solutions.

One RN describes a weekend without technology on her unit in this article. End of Shift: Nurses get Back to Basics. (from http://www.nurse.com/)

And finally, in the cool toys section, http://www.medgadget.com/ discusses the latest and greatest pulse oximeter. I'd really love to have one of these on the floor!