The Missing Decade: Nursing Informatics Can Shape the Future of Menopause Care

A fragmented documentation model and episodic care.

Perimenopause and menopause are not isolated events. They are dynamic physiologic transitions that can unfold over years, sometimes more than a decade, affecting sleep, cognition, mood, cardiovascular health, metabolic health, musculoskeletal function, sexual health, and overall quality of life. Midlife is not simply “the years before aging.” It is a critical window into healthy aging.

Yet most health care systems continue to function through episodic encounters and what has become the fragmented documentation model. A woman may discuss insomnia with one provider, anxiety with another, joint pain with an orthopedist, and irregular cycles with a gynecologist. Rarely are these experiences connected longitudinally across systems, specialties, or time.

The infrastructure reflects that fragmentation.

Many electronic health records (EHRs) still lack standardized structured fields for menopause stage, symptom burden, menstrual pattern changes, longitudinal symptom tracking, or patient-generated health data integration. Symptoms are often buried in free-text notes, inconsistently coded, or disconnected from meaningful clinical context. Even when women are telling us exactly what they are experiencing, our systems frequently lack the structure to interpret these lived experiences as computable longitudinal health data.

From a nursing informatics perspective, the signal is there. The systems simply are not built to see it.

The wider context.

By 2030, more than 1.2 billion women worldwide will […]

2026-06-03T10:27:58-04:00June 3rd, 2026|digital health, documentation, Nursing, nursing informatics, Patients, women's health|0 Comments
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From Care to Calling: How a Nurse’s Small Act Became a Lifelong Inspiration

Often, the simplest questions lead to the greatest moments of reflection and growth. While serving on a recent panel discussion, I was asked how I knew I wanted to be a nurse? The question offered me the opportunity to reflect on the butterfly effect of one nurse’s actions on the future of a teenage girl.

A mother’s sudden illness

I was 17 years old, a junior in high school, and growing increasingly excited about my first prom. The dress was picked out, the makeup decided, and my high school sweetheart (and current husband) had already asked me to be his date. Just prior to the big day, my mother began experiencing worsening headaches and increasingly noticeable vision changes. Though it was originally written off as stress or typical age-related vision changes, an eye appointment for a new prescription quickly led to a neurology consultation. With roughly 50% of my mother’s peripheral vision already gone, scans were ordered, and a craniopharyngioma was discovered.

Suddenly, prom was the last thing on my mind as my mother was admitted to a local cancer hospital for treatment of a large (noncancerous) brain tumor. Her surgery was scheduled for the day of the big dance. Her last words before being wheeled into surgery were, “When I wake up, the first thing I want to see are pictures of how beautiful you looked at the prom.”

2026-05-04T09:48:29-04:00April 2nd, 2026|career, family experience, Nursing, nursing career, Patients|0 Comments
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Fatigue in the Infusion Chair: Making Our Teaching Count

Cancer-related fatigue: not ordinary tiredness.

Image via Shutterstock

“I’m just really tired.”

She says it quietly, almost apologetically, while I’m flushing her port. If I’m not careful, I could nod and say, “That’s common,” and move on. But over time, I’ve learned that when a patient says “tired,” they’re often describing something much bigger.

Cancer-related fatigue isn’t the kind of tired that comes after a long day. It’s not fixed by a good night’s sleep. It’s the kind that makes someone say, “If I shower, I have to rest before I can get dressed,” or “If I cook dinner, that’s it for the day.”

In the infusion chair, fatigue is everywhere. During chemotherapy and radiation, most patients experience it at some point. For some, it lingers long after treatment ends. And when fatigue begins to interfere with daily life—cooking, driving, bathing, managing medications—it quietly erodes independence.

Talking to patients about fatigue.

But fatigue conversations are easy to rush. We have vitals to check, labs to review, medications to hang. It’s tempting to treat fatigue as expected background noise. I’ve found that the difference between a rushed fatigue conversation and a meaningful one often comes down to slowing down by just a minute.

Instead of asking only, “How tired are you?” I try to […]

2026-03-04T14:07:41-05:00March 4th, 2026|Nursing, Oncology nursing, patient experience, Patients|2 Comments
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The Language of Side Effects: How Words Shape a Patient’s Experience

Image: Shutterstock

The first time I told a patient, “You will probably lose your hair,” she froze. I watched her face change—the hope leaving her eyes before treatment even began. I meant to prepare her, but my certainty sounded like a sentence. Since then, I’ve learned the quiet power of words like might, can, and some patients. The difference is small, but to the person sitting in the chair, it’s everything.

Nurses speak thousands of words a day—vital signs, medication names, discharge instructions—but within that rhythm live phrases that shape how people cope. Our goal is never to soften reality or minimize side effects; patients deserve truth. What matters is how we deliver it—whether our tone invites fear or fosters partnership, whether our words validate the feelings that follow.

When I say, “You will feel tired,” the message sounds absolute, leaving no room for variation or hope. When I say, “Many people feel tired, and we’ll help you manage it if it happens,” the information is identical, but the intention changes. One predicts suffering; the other promises support.

Research confirms what bedside nurses sense: framing matters. In a randomized trial of more than […]

2026-02-03T11:25:41-05:00February 3rd, 2026|patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Cost-Cutting and Nursing: Are We Solving the Wrong Problems?

Courtney Desy, BSN, RN, OCN

Across the country, hospitals are under sustained financial pressure. Margins are thin, reimbursement often fails to cover the cost of care, supply chains remain fragile, and administrative demands continue to grow. Leaders are asked to stabilize organizations while navigating forces largely outside their control.

Those pressures inevitably reach the clinical floor.

In staff meetings, nurses hear familiar refrains: we need to be more efficient, we need to tighten workflows, we need to reduce waste. These requests are rarely made casually or without reason. They reflect real financial strain and genuine concern about sustainability.

But in high-acuity clinical settings—especially oncology—the question isn’t whether efficiency matters. It does.

The question is whether we are starting in the right place.

The Problem with starting at cost-cutting

Nurses are trained to define the problem before proposing solutions. In clinical care, jumping to treatment without understanding the diagnosis is unsafe. Yet in operational decision-making, the process is often reversed.

The implicit starting question becomes:

How do we cut costs?

Once that question is accepted, the solutions are predictable: tighter schedules, compressed staffing, reduced flexibility at the bedside. These approaches may lower expenses in the short term, but they rarely address the forces actually driving financial instability.

From the nursing perspective, that misalignment […]

2026-01-16T15:00:23-05:00January 14th, 2026|nurse staffing, Nursing, patient safety, safe staffing|3 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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