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Faculty-Staff-Student Issues during the Transition from Paper-Based to Electronic Health Records Systems

Thursday, 15 July 2010: 8:30 AM

Donna M. Nickitas
Nursing, Hunter College, New York, NY

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to identify the challenges nurse faculty and clinical preceptors face when teaching documentation using health-related technology-based information systems.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to describe the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed when using electronic documentations system in nursing practice.

Purpose:

The purpose of this paper is to share faculty, clinical agency staff, and student perceptions of learning-teaching documentation skills in a variety of urban hospital settings during the transition from paper-based to the EHRS.

Nursing faculty and clinical staff are learning their facilities evolving EHRS while at the same time teaching nursing students how to use this technology.  Recognizing this challenge, nursing faculty explored issues underlying the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the use of health technology-based information systems.  This study explores faculty, staff and student perceptions, and compares all three groups.

Methods:

In-person survey interviews were conducted with all eligible faculty and clinical agency preceptors who teach undergraduate nursing students from the college.  IRB approval was sought and received from the university and consent was obtained from all eligible faculty, clinical staff, and new graduates.   The project’s administrative assistant transcribed the interviews and confidential identifier codes were assigned.

Results:

The Constant Comparative Method (CCM), was used to analyze the data and identify significant patterns within and across groups.  The research team assigned data codes to the faculty (Phase I), staff (Phase II), and student (Phase II) questionnaire responses, and then the codes were organized into categories.  Categories were further synthesized into clusters from which major themes were identified for each group.  Overarching themes were identified across the three groups are:  expert clinicians transmit the skill, documentation skill acquisition occurs through a variety of teaching-learning methods, and organizational barriers persist.

Conclusion:

Results of this research will be used in the nursing school’s on-going efforts to increase the healthcare information competencies of nursing students and the formulation of a comprehensive plan for faculty development related to the integration of informatics throughout the nursing curricula.

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