Description/Overview: The current healthcare environment challenges nurse leaders to ensure high quality, customer-focused care, while reducing costs and streamlining processes to be more efficient. Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a vehicle for achieving this challenge; however, it requires resources that if not executed strategically and systematically can be perceived as extravagant and non-essential. EBP has been a top priority for over 25 years at a large academic medical center in the United States with dedicated experts partnering with nursing staff and leaders to promote EBP with ongoing evaluation, yielding quality outcomes. These practices create the business case for EBP with an eye on the potential return on investment (ROI), expected by healthcare leaders and administrators. There is minimal literature to guide nurse leaders to demonstrate the ROI from EBP. This symposium will describe the structure and process of this EBP program which has resulted in significant improvements in quality and safety and a clear ROI with budgetary commitment to expand the work. The ROI will be summarized from three perspectives: 1) a systematic EBP training program bringing EBP expertise to the bedside and illustrating the EBP process through specific examples that demonstrate cost savings and additional evaluative metrics; 2) the partnering with an outside vendor to provide staff with up-to-date EBP nursing procedures to provide quality nursing care while preserving advanced practice nursing time for ongoing EBP initiatives, education, sharing clinical expertise and research; and 3) expanding a research and EBP program that reinvests the ROI to focus on knowledge generation in areas of evidence gaps and advancing nursing practice. A multifaceted program is essential to permeate the complex healthcare systems in which nurses’ work. Essential elements of a comprehensive program will be highlighted along with up-front planning and evaluation for a measurable ROI.

Learner Objective #1: Describe how to compile the business case from strategic evidence-based practice initiatives

Learner Objective #2: Discuss examples of the return on investment (ROI) from a comprehensive evidence-based practice program