Telehealth as ‘Disruptive Innovation’ in Nursing

A patient uses telehealth equipment to communicate with his nurse. Photo courtesy of Janet Grady. A patient uses telehealth equipment to communicate with his nurse. Photo courtesy of Janet Grady.

“Telehealth: A Case Study in Disruptive Innovation” is a CE article in AJN‘s April issue. The author, Janet Grady, vice president of academic affairs and chair of the Nursing and Health Sciences Division at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, describes the concept of disruptive innovations in nursing and delves into the evolving field of telehealth as a current example.

The article considers the following:

  • uses and potential uses of telehealth in chronic and acute care, home care, and rural medicine, and the evidence supporting its use.
  • obstacles to wider use and acceptance of telehealth, which include cultural resistance within nursing, licensure issues across states, reimbursement challenges, and the need to adapt nursing curriculum to these new ways of delivering care.
  • forces that drive or obstruct disruptive innovations like telehealth.

Here’s the article overview:

Technologic advances in health care have often outpaced our ability to integrate the technology efficiently, establish best practices for its use, and develop policies to regulate and evaluate its effectiveness. However, these may be insufficient reasons to put the brakes on innovation—particularly those “disruptive innovations” that challenge the […]

2016-11-21T13:05:00-05:00April 18th, 2014|digital health, Nursing, patient engagement|1 Comment
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The Power of Imagination: Helping Kids with Sickle Cell Disease to Cope with Pain

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Many people with sickle cell disease suffer from both acute and chronic pain, which can be severe. Although the exact mechanism isn’t known, the pain is believed to result when sickled erythrocytes occlude the vascular beds, causing tissue ischemia. Such pain, which often begins in early childhood, arises unpredictably. Although some pain crises may require ED visits, hos­pitalization, opioid treatment, or a combination of these, most are managed at home. Yet little is known about at-home pain management in people with sickle cell disease, especially children.

Table 2. Changes in Self-Efficacy, Imaging Ability, and Pain Perception in School-Age Children After Guided Imagery Training Table 2. Changes in Self-Efficacy, Imaging Ability, and Pain Perception in School-Age Children After Guided Imagery Training

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has shown promise in helping patients with other chronic illnesses to cope with pain. Cassandra Elaine Dobson and Mary Woods Byrne decided to test guided imagery, a form of CBT, among children enrolled at one sickle cell treatment clinic in New York City. They report on their findings in this month’s original research CE, “Using Guided Imagery to Manage Pain in Young Children with Sickle Cell Disease.” The abstract below offers a quick overview; if you click the image above, you’ll see an enlarged view of one table showing key results.

Objectives: The purposes of this study were to test the effects of guided imagery training on school-age children who had been diagnosed with […]

2017-07-27T14:47:16-04:00April 2nd, 2014|nursing research, pain management, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Staffing and Long Shifts – Some Recent Coverage

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

by patchy patch, via flickr by patchy patch, via flickr

The March issue will soon be published and be featured on the home page of our Web site, so before the February issue is relegated to the archive section, I want to highlight two articles. Knowing that some readers of this blog may not be regular readers of AJN (I know, hard to believe), I wanted to bring them to your attention.

I don’t usually blog about my own editorials, but the February editorial (“It All Comes Back to Staffing”) has apparently resonated with many readers. I’ve received several letters and a request to reprint it from a state nursing association. (The editorial includes a portion of a poignant letter I received from a reader in response to an editorial I’d written for the December 2013 issue, “Straight Talk About Nursing,” in which I discussed missed care—that is, the nursing care that we don’t get to but is often at the heart of individualizing care.)

The February editorial ties in with a special report, “Can a Nurse Be Worked to Death?”, by Roxanne Nelson from Van Insurance, which addresses the recent death of a nurse who was killed in a car accident while driving home after […]

2017-05-11T21:22:34-04:00February 24th, 2014|nursing perspective, nursing research, patient engagement, patient safety, safe staffing|2 Comments
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A Physician Finally Gets Nursing

RelmanArticleCaptureBy Shawn Kennedy, editor-in-chief

Earlier this month, the New York Review of Books published an article by a patient who described his hospital stay following a life-threatening accident. This was no ordinary patient—the author, Arnold Relman, is a noted physician, emeritus professor of medicine at Harvard, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and along with his wife Marcia Angell, well known as a critic of the “medical–industrial complex.” His account is very detailed and gives a good example of how it can look when the system works (and when one has access to it).

His understanding of his condition and treatment, his knowledge of the system, and also his relative prominence as an individual, all undoubtedly helped him avoid some pitfalls and make a remarkable full recovery. However, as a number of others have pointed out recently, one comment in his account was surprising.

In reflecting on his hospitalization and recovery, he wrote, “I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.” After all his years in medicine, he only realized the value of nursing as a 90-year-old trauma patient.

This week, Lawrence Altman, another physician and author, wrote an excellent

2016-11-21T13:05:23-05:00February 14th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, patient safety|13 Comments
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Questions Dementia Patients Can’t Answer

by Ann Gordon, via Flickr Photo by Ann Gordon, via Flickr

By Amy M. Collins, editor

A few weeks ago I visited my grandmother, who suffers from dementia, at her assisted living home. In her room, my family and I noticed a complicated form with instructions for residents to get their flu vaccination. Residents had to fill it out, sign it, and bring it to the person administering the vaccine on a certain date. For my grandmother, this would be impossible—she can no longer remember what day it is, when or if she has eaten, who she’s spoken to within the last five minutes, or where her room is located.

When this concern was broached with the front desk of the facility, they seemed to be adamant that she needed to have the form with her on the day of vaccination. We could, of course, help her fill it out—but since it had been given directly to my grandmother, who was to say we would have ever learned of it except by chance? And who would make sure she brought it with her on the day of vaccination?

While the facility offers assisted living, they often remark that they are not a “dementia facility.” Looking around, however, one is hard-pressed to find a resident without […]

2016-11-21T13:05:26-05:00February 11th, 2014|patient engagement|14 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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