Module 4: Question 2

1. How does nursing data quality relate to decision support?

Nursing data quality is very important to decision support. Accurate data and pertinent information gathered during an assessment and then charted appropriately is essential to making quality decisions. Without sound data to build your decision on, then like we discussed in the previous questions, your decision is going to be based on experience and intuition which is not the most accurate way to make decisions in clinical practice. This data is also essential in the development of the decision support tools. In order to help us make decisions, we need to know what kind of data we are gathering and the best way to obtain that information to get consistent and accurate results.

Module 4: Question 1

1. How did the readings influence your perception of your own clinical decision-making? How do we reconcile the value of nursing experience with known heuristics and biases used in human decision making?

As I was reading the articles regarding clinical decision making, I found it very interesting for an article to be so closely evaluating something that is part of my everyday routine. It has been challenging for me to look at my own decision making and see how these heuristics come into play. I firmly believe in evidence based practice, but I also know that experience and intuition play a huge role in my decision making from day to day. I believe there has to be a conscience effort by the individual to try and recognize their own heuristics and see them for what they are. Some of the techniques described in the Thompson article supported this idea, when he discusses the overconfidence scenario of the nurse being 90% sure of plan of action that the nurse should stop for a moment and think, do I still think this is the right thing if do if I was only 75% sure. Nurses need to look at themselves and there own thought processes to examine if they are making their decisions based solely on experience or a mixture of evidence and experience which I view as ideal.

Module 3

What strengths were highlighted in the results of your multiple intelligence test? How do you interpret these results? What technologies might you incorporate to augment your personal learning based on these results?

My two highest areas in the multiple intelligence test were Musical and Interpersonal. I agree with and strongly identify with both of those areas. The other areas of intelligence ended up being pretty equal without one being really low. I feel the musical intelligence makes me an auditory learner and with the interpersonal I prefer to be able to interact with other people and share ideas back and forth.
Based on these results I should find ways to incorporate more auditory connections into my learning. I could search for podcasts or video taped lectures, or find a program that would read aloud my text books. For the interpersonal strength, I feel that the Polycom system we use for the distance program is very helpful because I am able to ask questions and interact with other students rather than simply watching a powerpoint or reading in the text.

Module 2

You used an electronic index, a guideline index, and a web search engine to retrieve information relevant to your clinical problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/ not useful for your information retrieval task, and why? Identify some alternative strategies for retrieving relevant information - would context relevant information retrieval be useful?

I obtained different information with each different search engine. PubMed retrieved a huge number of resources on very specific topics, there was a lot of information to look through but once a searched around for a little while I was able to find information that was exactly what I was looking for. The NGC search retrieved so very good information as well, but for my topic is was a little more generalized than I was looking for but it provided a lot of good background and current clinical practice guidelines. The Google search provided some new information that was very relevant to my topic I found HRSA research that may be buried in my PubMed results somewhere, but was easily found using Google, most of the other information retrieved on Google was not quite what I was looking for and wouldn’t hold up to academic standards. Using the variety of search resources increased the amount of information available to choose from and each different resource provided something that the others did not.

Module 2

1. What features in your chosen reference management software can be used to sort, classify, and otherwise organize references? Describe software functionality that allows you to better organize and share information for efficient retrieval and use.

I chose to use Endnote as my reference management software. Endnote has several features that are very helpful in organizing and finding your references. You can build different libraries or groups for different searches you may be doing to have all of the articles sorted and saved together. You can then make notes about each article as you read it that will save with the article in endnote so that when you go back to look through the information you know more about why you picked that article and what it discussed. Once the articles are in your endnote library, endnote will go out and search for full text copies of the articles and if they are available endnote will download them and save them within the library so that all of the information you need is within one folder. Another good endnote feature is the ability to further fine tune your search questions by using the search function in endnote

Module 2

1. Describe your clinical problem and choice of electronic index. How did the index facilitate (or impede) your ability to construct an efficient search? How time consuming was your search? Would there be barriers to using the index in daily practice?

My clinical problem that I chose to investigate was substance abuse treatment in HIV-positive women. I chose to use PubMed as my search index because I have seen it used a lot this semester by faculty and have not have much experience with it in the past. The “Limits” tab in PubMed really helped me to fine tune my search. I was able to select only adults, females, articles published within the past 5 years, and also my keywords of HIV, women, and substance abuse treatment. Even with all of these search terms I came up with quite a few articles to look through. The search engine was easy to use and I was able to complete my search fairly quickly, but finding the specific information I was looking for took more time. The only barrier I can see to using PubMed in daily practice is the amount of information it has available is so vast. The practitioner would have to be very skilled in using exact search terms to find the information that would really be helpful in clinical practice.

Module 1

My name is Kelly Roscheck. I am in the distance Family Nurse Practitioner program. I live in Boise, Idaho. As a graduate level nurses it’s important to know about information management because gathering data is how we are going to make decisions and we need to know how to find and organize that information in order to make the best decisions for our patients and our practice. We need to know where to find clinical information and how to use technology to better serve the needs of our clients.

I work as a float nurse between many different departments and all of these different departments use a different computer charting system. My hospital recently began using a new charting system that was supposed to “work for anywhere in the hospital” and so far that has not happened. On a day-to-day basis I use 5 different charting systems all of them utilize structured documentation. We are encouraged to use the structured documentation option whenever possible, it saves time for the patient care staff and allows for easier chart reviews and performance improvement data gathering.