News

November 2009
Technology-Enhanced Nursing: Realizing the Future

The Tenth Annual Littlefield Leadership Lecture, held October 2, 2009, and sponsored by the UW–Madison School of Nursing, was the first event in a two-day long Power of Nursing summit to launch the final phase of fundraising for a new facility for the School of Nursing.

Health IT expert Patricia Flatley Brennan, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, the Lillian S. Moehlman-Bascom Professor of Nursing and chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, presented the keynote lecture entitled "Leading with Technology." Presentations by Dean Katharyn May, DNSc, RN, FAAN, and Pamela Scheibel, MS, RN, followed her lecture.

Brennan began by raising a challenging issue for nursing: How will educators teach technology-enhanced nursing and how will clinicians integrate it in practice?"

By definition, Brennan said, technology-enhanced nursing is the purposeful use of health information technology (IT) to help patients achieve goals. "Technology-enhanced nursing won’t make your life easier," she said, "but it will facilitate new kinds of partnerships with patients and consumers in health care. I’m here today to demonstrate how technology can support nursing in meeting patient goals."

She showed the audience two videos demonstrating her current research projects. Project HealthDesign, a $10 million RWJ-funded program, employs technologies that engage patients in self-care and disease management. The Health Technology Design in the Living Environments Laboratory–part of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), opening December 2010—will examine how environment mediates behavior. A virtual reality chamber to create 3-D visualizations of a household as well as an apartment to test technologies are part of the lab’s master plan to create context-aware designs that allow people to manage their health more effectively in partnership with health care providers.

Brennan asked listeners to consider ways to envision and implement technology-enhanced nursing. Consider the educators, she said, who teach for the future—teaching lines of reasoning rather than facts, teaching to find, appraise, and use rather than know, teaching to question rather than to answer. Consider the administrators who find ways to encourage exploration, stimulate imagination, and reward innovation. Consider the nurses who look at points of intervention in practice and select technologies that support those points.

"It is the job of nurses to ask 'If only I had…' and then make it happen," Brennan said. "Maybe someday, a smarter Band-aid will alert the wearer to infection."

Dean May, who presented "The Future of Nursing Is Here…Now," echoed her colleague’s focus on environments to direct the future. "Our students will lead," May said, "but we must create technology-enriched learning environments that allow us to move at the speed at which our students learn and to prepare them for the technologies of the future.

"My job as dean," May emphasized, "is to think about what kinds of environments we need so that students and faculty can do things differently and then to help create those environments." She asked listeners to imagine a center for technology-enhanced nursing (CTEN) in the proposed Nursing Science Center that would include a home simulations lab, "where nursing, medical, pharmacy, engineering, and design students can work in partnership," May explained," to see how environments need to be structured to allow people to take better care of themselves at home."

Scholarly approaches to future practice will look different as well, May said. A teaching-learning innovation component of the center would provide faculty the exploratory environment to create the next generation of patient care scenarios for clinical simulation environments and then to forward them to sister nursing schools around the state or nation for other faculty to use and improve upon.

Additionally, CTEN would have what May envisioned as a "technology-transfer room," where new products in health technology can be road-tested by students from various health professional schools on campus. This environment would allow students to "crash the system safely," May described. Researchers could then determine what new functionalities in electronic health record systems may not work as well in practice as in theory; educators could see where students may have "blind spots" in how they approach new clinical technologies—blind spots that might affect patient safety if unaddressed.

Scheibel presented "Supporting Nursing Education with Bits and Bytes," offering the audience a pictorial slideshow of education technologies used within the broader context of cultural change. "Technology has changed education," Scheibel said. "The concept of 'what you know' has changed from what you have stored in your memory to what information you have access to and what you can do with that information."

As director of the school’s technology-enhanced teaching and learning lab, Scheibel demonstrated the use of existing technologies used at the School of Nursing, including YouTube, high-fidelity patient simulators, and virtual reality sites. She also presented samples of emerging technologies—virtual conferencing, virtual clinical practicums, serious gaming, WAVE or wide-area virtual environments, and e-ICUs–to occupy the proposed Nursing Science Center, where resources and space allow greater access to them.

Wherever the future takes technology-enhanced nursing, Scheibel said, "I am confident that the UW–Madison School of Nursing will be there."