Research

Research Project Topics

  • NurseMind research project poster As NurseMind addresses nursing safety and effectiveness issues, it's a likely topic for governmental and foundation grant-based research. An important component of this approach includes measurement and evaluation of outcomes. To that end, a research project has been designed, as described in this Powerpoint presentation and the project poster shown here (click it for a full-sized image).
  • Best practices for industry/healthcare/academia collaborations --
    • Impacts of introductions of new technologies into clinical practice
      • How to manage and mitigate these processes
      • "Sandboxes" for testing informatics products
      • How to choose beta sites and how to do beta testing
    • Nursing workflows
      • How to evaluate new tools and processes in context of live workflows
    • Data management
      • Data protection, HIPAA, PHI
      • Tracking data flows;  security, access, and authorization controls
      • Data in "the cloud"
      • Dealing with data produced and consumed by new devices
    • Strategic direction of IT department
    • Working with vendors
    • Systematic processes for approving projects
    • User issues:  usability, surveys, training, etc.
    • Ownership and licensing of intellectual property
    • Non-disclosure and legalities of relationships
      • Compliance
      • Liability
    • Publishing:  which journals?  which audiences?
      • Practice-focused:  HIT people, administrative decision-makers, clinicians
      • Scholarship-focused:  researchers, clinicians
        • Publish/present at ANIA/CARING
  • Missed nursing care
    • The big picture -- cognitive and workplace challenges of nursing
    • New tools for time and task management
    • Analyze reductions in missed care and other outcomes
    • Validate at the level of a shift on a unit
    • Metrics:  outcomes, nurse stress/job satisfaction, actual missed care
  • "Personally-Created Cognitive Artifacts" (i.e. nurses' "brains"), per Sharon McLane, MS, MBA, RN-BC, 2009 doctotral dissertation, Univ TX
    • Collect, analyze their content to characterize nurses' cognitive burden
    • Informal/anecdotal collection started on this web site
    • Apply NASA's cognitive burden scale to nursing