Friday, 20 July 2018
Jane Carrington, PhD, RN, FAAN
Colege of Nursing, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Judith Effken, PhD, RN, FACMI, FAAN
College of Nursing, University of Arizona, Oro Valley, AZ, USA
Bonnie, L. Westra, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI
School of Nursing & Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Dominique Tobbell, PhD
Program in the History of Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Maribeth Slebodnik, MLS, BSN
College of Nursing, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
SIGNIFICANCE: Despite a half century of efforts by industry, practitioners and government to develop a useful, usable electronic heath record (EHR) that facilitates clinicians’ practice and improves patient care outcomes, nurses continue to encounter a “data-rich, information-poor” EHR (xxx, and xxx, Fall, 2017; xxx and Weaver, 2016) . Although there are numerous big data and data science initiatives around the world, nurses remain “information -poor” because we are only beginning to learn how to access and share best practices and use big data. As part of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science (NKBDS) Initiative, the Transforming Nursing Documentation Workgroup synthesized literature and experience to describe concisely how today’s nurses remain “information-poor” (OʼBrien et al., 2015) and consulted nursing informatics leaders who had tackled this problem in their own agencies. To increase broader sharing of nursing informatics innovations, a Repository Workgroup was created and asked to identify potential repositories to house tools emerging from NKBDS Workgroups along with vendor-neutral best practices in electronic documentation that could streamline nursing workflow, increase the amount of decision support for nurses, provide feedback about performance, and improve patient safety and quality outcomes (XXX et al., 2016).
PURPOSE: The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of the repository project, its current status, and mechanisms for international participation.
METHODOLOGY: We selected the Sigma Theta Tau (STT) Henderson Repository. The STT repository is well suited for this project because it has nearly 10 years of experience and is supported by ongoing funding. The repository infrastructure is well established and can house artifacts in any format—even videos. Authors retain copyright of any materials they submit. When users download and apply a best practice or tool in their setting, they will be asked to submit a short evaluation of their experience in its application to provide feedback to creators and help assess its generalizability. We are currently crafting a plan with STT Repository staff for initial and ongoing curation by nursing informatics experts, as well as a plan for initial and ongoing evaluation.
CONCLUSION: We anticipate that the Best Informatics Practices E-Repository will provide an efficient way for nurses world-wide to share informatics tools and best practices to streamline nursing workload while improving patient outcomes and building nursing informatics science.
