Module 8

The Frontier of Digital Nursing & Computer Applications

consumer health informatics

• the sub-specialty of nursing informatics that focuses on the patient as the primary user of health information

• represents a shift from “doctor-centered” care to “patient-empowered” care

• the nurse acts as a digital health coach, helping patients navigate the vast landscape of patient portals, mobile health apps, and wearable trackers

public health informatics and population health

• the systematic application of information science to support public health practice, including surveillance, prevention, and health promotion

• involves the use of “big data” to track trends across cities or countries

data mining and analytics

• the process of discovering patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data

• we use this in nursing to answer the question: “what happened?” “what will happen?”

generative ai and prompt design in healthcare

• can create new content: summaries, care plans, or even code

• in healthcare, this power must be “aligned” with nursing safety and ethics

role, context, specifics, formats

rcsf framework in prompt design:

research

• a systematic inquiry that uses disciplined methods to answer questions and solve problems

• has the ultimate goal of developing, refining, and expanding a body of knowledge

nursing research

• a systematic inquiry designed to develop trustworthy evidence about issues of importance to the nursing profession, including nursing practice, education, administration, and informatics

• involves a plethora of tools and resources that researchers employ throughout the research process

• the investigators must be well prepared in a variety of computerized techniques for research activities as they are employed in the domain of knowledge that will be investigated

• new tools for automatic capture and analysis are changing the methods textbooks. new online strategies and apps are being implemented as the process of researching health and the product of researched interventions in health

quantitative research

the researcher is obliged to fully develop each aspect of the research proposal before collecting any data

qualitative research

the researcher is obligated to allow the data collected to determine the subsequent steps as it unfolds in the process and/or the analysis

data collection

• case studies

• checklists

• interviews

• observation

• surveys or questionnaires

ONLINE data collection

• device magic

• fulcrum

• magpi

• fastfield

• zoho forms

survey

• google forms

• survey monkey

• poll everywhere

• gimlet

smart cap

used to measure patient compliance with medications

medication event monitoring system

automates digitized data that can be downloaded for analysis in research such as patient adherence studies

web surveys

• although often criticized for yielding poorer response rates than traditional main are becoming increasingly popular for their cost and logistical benefits

• the data from the internet can be downloaded for analysis and several applications provide instant summary statistics that can be monitored over the data collection period

data processing and database apps

• spreadsheet

• spss

• sas (statistical analysis system)

• nvivo

nvivo

• can manage documents, audio, and video files as categories, attributes, or nodes in visual displays that show the structure and properties of the document

• the latest version of this also allows researchers to import exported data from other applications such as the online survey tool