Week 5 Peers Replies NSG 3150 HC Informatics
NSG 3150 – Healthcare Informatics
Week 5 – Peer Response Instructions
· Substantially respond to at least two other student posts in a way that prompts further input or provides another viewpoint. Describe a situation from your nursing professional experience that backs up your viewpoint and discuss the social, moral, political, and economic factors impacting your position.
· Please respond to peers thoughtfully, add value to the discussion, and apply ideas, insights, or concepts from scholarly sources, such as: journal articles, assigned readings, textbook material, lectures, course materials, or authoritative websites.
· Provide a rationale for your response with at least one scholarly source using an APA in-text citation and full reference.
Mandy Cross
Aug 10 at 2:51pm
Describe how technology and informatics are used to support the interventions used in practice?
During bedside shift report, both day and night nurse gives a report on the patient’s medical diagnosis and history at the bedside. Technology can help track the staff to ensure they’re doing report at the bedside. Some facilities have the ability to track when a nurse goes in and out of a room or every time, they use hand sanitizer.
Describe how employing evidence-based practice guidelines improve patient outcomes?
Evidenced-based practice proves that processes work by already being implemented into practice. Utilizing bedside shift reports involves the patient in their care and decreases mistakes. Facts show that the patient has caught mistakes during bedside shift report and nursing has also caught mistakes by during report or checking all lines and drains.
What benefits and challenges have you experienced with (the integration of) information technology in your practice?
The benefit we’ve experienced is a decrease in mistakes made, which is a huge patient safety issue so that helps keep patients safe. This also helps nursing staff set eyes on their patient in case anything is off. Patients enjoy being a part of their care and can request not to have bedside shift report if not. Some challenges we’ve had are getting the buy-in from nurses. Nursing is so task-oriented, and shortcuts are more prominent with staffing being extremely thin.
What strategies did you, or could you, use to overcome these challenges?
Explaining the why is a huge thing for me. I also know that nurses often don’t understand why something changes, so explaining the why will give them the reason and meaning behind it. Getting your charge nurses behind and helping navigate the change helps get more buy-in from the nursing staff as well.
Elines Torres-Cedeno
Aug 9 at 9:39pm
One evidence-based practice that my facility uses to improve patient outcomes is the sepsis protocol. We use a web-based algorithm called SPOT-Sepsis Prevention and Optimization of Therapy to detect patients at risk for sepsis. The SPOT system is triggered by a combination of factors including the patient’s vital signs and lab values. If a patient flags as meeting the algorithms SPOT criteria a notification is sent to the patient’s care team and the patient is to be assessed for potential intervention. Upon notification, the patient’s nurse or provider has up to 27 minutes to input data regarding organ function status, mental status, and whether the patient is on antibiotics (which indicates that at some point someone thought this patient may have an infection). That combination of data-some technology-based, some human assessment based-is used to determine if a patient is sepsis positive. If so they should receive intervention in the form of fluid resuscitation and antibiotics within one hour of identification.
The benefits of having an actionable sepsis monitoring system and protocol for intervention are evident in patient outcomes, as mortality increases with each hour without intervention. The adaptation of machine-based algorithms such as SPOT monitoring aid in timely treatment, which is important in preventing mortality and improving recovery among affected patients (Shadid et al, 2023).
The challenges we have faced with this system are few, except for the occasional annoyance of nursing staff, which occurs when a patient is either admitted for sepsis and receiving treatment and yet continues to flag for screening, or when those flags are explained by a reason other than sepsis, yet they continue to flag for reassessment as often as every six hours. This can cause some “alarm fatigue”, where nurses miss signs that the system is picking up accurately related to sepsis or worsening sepsis which would require intervention. We overcome this by having a sepsis coordinator, who is assigned to independently reassess these patients and determine their status. This coordinator also assures that those flagging positive for sepsis are indeed receiving all necessary parts of the protocols implementation bundle in a timely manner.
Reference:
Shahid, M.U., Furqan. M., Fatima, S., (2023). Machine-based algorithm: a revolution we need for early sepsis diagnosis in hospitals. The Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association. 73(8). https://10.47391/JPMA.8318