‘Meaningful Use’: What’s It All About, And Why Should Nurses Care?

By Susan McBride, PhD, RN, professor at Texas Tech University Health Science Center School of Nursing. McBride and fellow nurse informaticists Mari Tietze and John Delaney will be blogging here on the intersection of nursing and informatics in the coming days. 

Everyone knows by now that the Obama administration has made electronic health records (EHRs) a high priority and is providing financial incentives to health care providers (and yes, nurses are included in that group) to adopt them. But not everyone knows it’s not just about converting records from paper to digital—its much more than that.

On July 13, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT) released the final rules establishing definitions for the “meaningful use” of EHRs. The final rule is 864 pages and contains critical information for nurses to understand about how electronic records will change our lives. 

(No one expects every nurse to read the entire document. That’s why we’re going to be blogging about some important aspects of the topic. In the meantime, click here for a good overview of meaningful use and electronic medical records, as well as links to more exhaustive information. And for a short, useful table breaking down the rule by health outcomes policy priorities such as “improving care coordination,” have a look at this PDF: Stage 1. Meaningful Use Objectives and Associated Measures Sorted […]

2016-11-21T13:16:23-05:00July 26th, 2010|digital health, Nursing|6 Comments
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Notes from the Nursosphere: Blogging Ethics, Tar Ball Vacation, Treating the Whole Person

Here’s a few things that got our attention late this week:

Chronic Disease Expert: U.S. Health Care Needs to Treat the ‘Whole Person’: At Kaiser Health News, a Q & A with a Stanford University chronic disease expert (who started her health care career as a registered nurse) focuses on the fragmentation of our health care system. Here’s a sample:

Q. Could the health care system do a better job addressing chronic disease?

A. The system would probably need to be totally reorganized if it was really going to do that. Right now, it addresses diseases or even parts of diseases or small sub-parts of the body. It does not address the whole, complex person with multiple chronic diseases. So, right now, what happens, if you’re lucky, you go to a primary care doc who kind of does the day-to-day stuff and then you see four or five specialists each of which do their little specialty part — none of whom really talk to each other except maybe to look at your laboratory tests on an electronic medical record if you’re really lucky.

It is totally uncoordinated. It’s chaotic. It serves pieces of people, not whole people.

Mental Health Impact of BP Spill Multiplies: Feel depressed and hopeless about the Gulf Oil Spill? At Covering Health, an article sketches out some of the journalistic work being done to look at what some people have actually begun calling “Gulf Oil Syndrome.”

Speaking of the oil spill, Sean Dent, a nurse who blogs at My Strong Medicine, has a recent post called 

2016-11-21T13:17:01-05:00June 25th, 2010|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Online Social Networks for Chronic Illness – Time for Providers to Take Them Seriously

For many people, social networks are a place for idle chatter about what they made for dinner or sharing cute pictures of their pets. But for people living with chronic diseases or disabilities, they play a more vital role.

“It’s really literally saved my life, just to be able to connect with other people,” said Sean Fogerty, 50, who has multiple sclerosis, is recovering from brain cancer and spends an hour and a half each night talking with other patients online.

That’s from an article in the technology section of today’s NY Times, which draws upon a report from the Pew Internet and American Life Foundation about how people with chronic illnesses are finding connection, support, and information in online social networks like DiabetesConnect.

Chronic illness can be isolating for many reasons: you often can’t explain a condition’s relentlessness and complexity to those around you; at the same time, you may be homebound or to some degree limited in the types of activities you can engage in.

Providers should be aware of such online networks and the role they play for patients. Patients get useful information about self-care, and they feel less alone—though some who study online social networks do caution against any sites where the mood is focused entirely on the negative. Good feelings and bad (like good information and bad) can both be infectious on the Web, as we’ve learned during recent political debates.

2016-11-21T13:18:36-05:00March 25th, 2010|digital health, Nursing|1 Comment
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Marketers Honing In On Online Nurses

Internet Splat Map (jurvetson/via Flickr)

Nurses, you’re being watched: a marketing Website has an article on the growing influence of nurses online. Let us know what you think. Here’s an excerpt:

. . . Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online – over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view.

Also found today on the Web: […]
2016-11-21T13:22:00-05:00October 2nd, 2009|health care policy, healthcare social media|1 Comment
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Bloggers Who Blur Line Between Product Reviews and Paid Advertising May Face Regulation

I listened with interest because I frequently receive requests from companies that want us to casually mention their products or Websites on this blog. What the marketers who send these promotional materials don't seem to know is that AJN maintains a very clear separation between editorial and advertising content. This is very very important to us at a time when there are daily reports of research that's been ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies and of influenctial physicians and health care reporters with close ties to various health care industries.

2016-11-21T13:23:51-05:00August 11th, 2009|Ethics, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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