![]() ![]() "It's very exciting to think that this pilot study is the foundation to build an objective way of calculating nurse intensity," says Harper. This is turn will more precisely determine the workload for nursing care hours so neither quality of care nor cost considerations are compromised. The CDI model can create a profile of nurse intensity and the data can be used to predict the amount of patient care needed in real time. Harper is now working along with her employer to further refine the Clinical Demand Index (CDI), an algorithm that calculates the amount of staff needed to care for an individual patient. "That's what computers are good at," she says.Īnother strength of Harper's study was that it involved using multiple sources and techniques for the data gathering process, including the admission, discharge and transfer data collected from the electronic medical records (EMRs) of the patients on the nursing unit. Hunches are usually wrong and often reflect bias. She notes that identifying these activities is not possible for a human: Harper's mixed-methods study used observation and data mining techniques to determine which care activities have the greatest impact on the amount of direct care needed for each patient. Harper found that the problem with existing staffing systems is that they are not real-time or designed to consider variables such as the patient's medical diagnosis, age morbidities, family demands, best practices research and the skill set and experience of the individual nurses on staff. Harper performed her research from a comparative effectiveness approach, which was stressed in her DNP course work. It was this course that set the theoretical framework. She notes that one course that was particularly useful to her covered the contemporary use of health care information technology (HIT). Harper found that American Sentinel's DNP program provided her all the tools she needed to tackle a complex problem and devise an evidence-based solution. The goal was to create a new model for predicting nurse intensity, which can be defined as the total time and staffing mix of nursing resources used by an individual patient across an episode of care. Harper obtained administrative approval to perform an on-site study at a carefully selected hospital, and this research formed the basis of her Capstone project. "It's been both a personal and professional goal to find the sweet spot between staffing and outcomes - both clinical and financial." ![]() So I thought if only we could find an objective tool that takes the emotions out of that," says Harper. "I've always thought that nurses weren't given the credibility they deserved and that staffing levels were always being questioned. She points out that there's a huge body of evidence pointing out the relationship between staffing levels and outcomes, both clinical and financial, yet there is currently no consensus on the best way to determine nurse-to-patient ratios. "Because American Sentinel's program is designed to address the complexities of modern-day health care, I found it easy to apply this newfound knowledge to the high-tech field of informatics," says Harper. ![]() Harper was among the first DNP Executive Leadership cohort to graduate from American Sentinel University and used her Capstone project to embark on research needed to develop just such an evidence-based staffing tool - something the nursing industry sorely lacked. Nurses represent the largest proportion of direct health care providers and an under- or over-staffed unit could have major implications for quality of patient care, costs, patient satisfaction and nurse job retention - that is, until one health care executive identified a solution for a gap she detected in the IT industry's collective offering of nursing scheduling solutions.Įllen Harper, DNP, MBA, RN, vice president, chief nursing officer-premier west of Cerner Corporation and recent graduate of American Sentinel University's Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Executive Leadership program felt that nursing was missing a world-class acuity tool to help with staffing that can determine how many patients one nurse can care for based on each patient's daily needs, which can change over the course of a patient's hospitalization.Īs an executive for one of the world's largest providers of health care information technologies and as chief nursing officer, she works with clients to help them with their vision for data-driven process improvement initiatives. American Sentinel's DNP Executive Leadership Provided Tools Needed to Tackle a Complex Problem and Design an Evidence-Based Solution. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |