A Nursing Central Project Registry: An Essential Tool for the Evidence-Based Practice Toolkit

A Nursing Central Project Registry was developed to provide a central access point for 10,000 nurses within an organization to search, view, and enter new and completed quality improvement projects and research studies. This technological innovation fosters evidence-based practice across Mayo Clinic Nursing as the Central Project Registry facilitates connection, collaboration, and dissemination of knowledge amongst nurses in diverse nursing roles and settings throughout 97 physical locations. This level of innovative enterprise-wide learning, supported through technology, contributes to advancing the science and practice of nursing.

The goal of this session is to introduce a Nursing Central Project Registry as an essential technological tool that provides a wealth of internal evidence with granular detail to assist nurses in assessing their current practice. This session will demonstrate the depth and breadth of the Nursing Central Project Registry.  Practical examples such as how nurses enrolled in formal nursing education programs search the Registry to identify current and past projects, studies, and leaders with an interest similar to their own. The capabilities of this technological innovation will be demonstrated with emphasis on utilizing the Registry to avoid unnecessary duplication and learning from the lessons of other nurses. To that end, the Registry has the ability to store evidence tables, evidence summaries, and published articles authored by nurses. The Nursing Central Project Registry was implemented on a small scale to a pilot group in April 2009 and was available for general use as an innovative tool in the Mayo Clinic Nursing EBP Toolkit in June 2009.

At the completion of this session, the participant will be able to: 1) define a Nursing Central Project Registry as an essential tool in an EBP Toolkit; 2) identify features of a Nursing Central Project Registry that enhance connection, collaboration, and dissemination of nursing knowledge.