‘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 by […]

2016-11-21T13:16:23-05:00July 26th, 2010|digital health, Nursing|6 Comments
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Should We Be Wary of Magic Pills for Shift Work Sleep Disorder?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editorial director/interim editor-in-chief

Nurses of course work shifts—in my first year in the ER, I rotated monthly: one month on days, one on evenings, and one on nights. Nights were the hardest—coming to work at 11:30 pm when everyone else was still partying or heading to bed. Then trying to sleep in a 3rd floor apartment on Second Avenue in Manhattan—you could still hear all the street noises with the windows closed. You never quite felt yourself on a night shift.

But eventually you found ways to deal with sleeping—you got used to the noise and the light (earplugs and sleep masks helped). And then there was coffee or Coke or Pepsi and chocolate; for some it was NoDoz because they didn’t like coffee. Many of us found it worked well to sleep once kids went off to school and until they got home; that allowed for some errands to get done and for some family time at dinner. Then, a quick “laydown” for a nap around  9 pm for an hour or so was enough to get us through the night shift. Colleagues without children would head right out to do chores early in the morning and then head home to sleep from 1 pm to 9 pm. Summers were great—we’d […]

2016-11-21T13:16:25-05:00July 23rd, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
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Parting Thoughts: 10 Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life

The final post in a series by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Senior Adviser for Nursing, sent to us as dispatches from her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career. The full series can be found by clicking here.  

My husband has called this trip a “game changer” for me, and indeed it has been.  I see things differently now, including our health care system . . . and the critical contributions that nurses are making, and need to continue making, to improve care for patients. Of course, I always knew this, but somehow this ups the ante for me—and I will use my new education to up the ante for nurses. I have learned so much, but let me share these 10 lessons I gleaned from Ms. Nightingale.


1. Never, ever stop learning.

A broad education in the arts and sciences helps with critical thinking and making important connections that lead to action. I saw how Florence used her knowledge of math, statistics, sanitation, religion, and architecture to put a holistic plan together to improve the systems that care for patients.

2. Ground yourself and your work in facts and evidence.

Make your case indisputable.  Everyone should do this . . . not just those who call themselves “researchers.”

3. Muster the courage to follow your convictions.

Step beyond what you think you can do.

4. Treat every person holistically.

Every person has […]

2026-05-07T12:08:10-04:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing history|10 Comments
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Scutari: A Blog Post Will Never Do Justice To This Visit

This is the second to last in a series of posts by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, that chronicle her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career.

Scutari was a “tragedy of epic proportions of which bureaucratic muddle and sheer human incompetence played the larger part, thrown in with a measure of bad luck.”

–Mark Bostridge, from his book, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon

The Hospital: What Florence Experienced
It is almost incongruent that a woman who wrote more than 14,000 letters and 200 books said upon arriving at Scutari Hospital, a converted army barracks, that she was without words to describe what she saw. Of course, as time caught up with her, the words flowed quite freely. Death and mutilation surrounded her in this well-known deathtrap.  Her nurses slept (“in catnaps”) in cramped quarters. Men were cramped into rooms and spilled out into the long corridors as they lay on straw beds on cold stone floors. Attendants had to walk over the men who were, by Nightingale’s command, a requisite 18 inches apart. More men died than lived.

Nightingale hardly slept, took her meals by the spoonful, and spent most of her time caring for the men, overseeing the band […]

2016-11-21T13:16:28-05:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing research|4 Comments
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Searching for the Evidence? AJN Series Demystifies EBP

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Trying to get evidence-based practice (EBP) implemented in your hospital or nursing home? Running into problems or just not quite sure how to proceed? Well, AJN has the answer.


EBP should be the basis for any clinical practice. Since last November, AJN has published a series of articles by the faculty at Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation’s Center for the Advancement of Evidence-Based Practice. Articles are published every other month and are designed to take the reader, step-by-step, towards implementing EBP. The current article describes the beginning steps to appraising the evidence; or go here to read the first article and follow in sequence.

Listen to a podcast with series leaders Bernadette Melnyk, PhD, RN, CPNP/PMHNP, FNAP, FAAN, and Ellen Fineout-Overholt, PhD, RN, FNAP, FAAN, the authors of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing & Healthcare: A Guide to Best Practice. And we’ll have a second “Ask the Authors” call in November (check our home page for details after November 1).

If you’ve had problems or hit snags on your journey to EBP, e-mail me (shawn.kennedy@wolterskluwer.com) so we can address these issues on our next call.

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2017-05-27T10:32:54-04:00July 21st, 2010|Nursing|0 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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