Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Nursing Education Perspectives

A call to action: preparing the next generation of nurses.

Article Excerpt
IN MY TENURE WRITING THIS COLUMN, I have tried to provide briefs about emerging technologies that will affect teaching and learning in higher education. I have also, on occasion, called attention to issues related to informatics competencies and information literacy. At this time, I want to focus on a pressing curriculum issue that we will all face in the near future--the movement toward an informatics-intensive health care delivery system.

* As informatics-intensive care delivery develops in the clinical arena, we in education will need to grapple with how best to prepare nurses to practice in a transformed health care environment. Schools of nursing will begin to experience a type of digital divide. Faculty who do not have access to the various clinical information systems that nurses will use as integral components of practice will have difficulty understanding how the nursing curriculum needs to change. BUT HAVE NO FEAR. HELP IS COMING. A GRASSROOTS EFFORT

HAS SET OUT TO TACKLE THIS CHALLENGE.

The TIGER Team During the spring of 2004, President Bush called for national implementation of interoperable electronic health records by the year 2014. He also established, by executive order, the position of national coordinator for health information technology and named Dr. David Brailer to fill that post. In July 2004, Dr. Brailer announced the Strategic Plan for Health Information Technology, which set forth the goal of creating a health care delivery system that is consumer-centric and has an informatics infrastructure to provide safe, quality care. The strategic plan has four major goals:

* Inform clinicians by encouraging the widespread adoption of electronic health records

* Interconnect clinicians so that data and information can be more easily shared

* Personalize care...