Nurses with “White Caps” and now with “Apps”
Technology….to me…is amazing, wonderful, and once you learn how to use it effectively, is so helpful! I have been using my electronic medical record (EMR) at my job for almost two years and I still learn a new trick and short cut at least every couple of weeks. I have some reservations about the accuracy, generalizability, and the overall safety, but all in all, I feel that these are helpful tools that will only provide practitioners more knowledge right at their fingertips. I have already witnessed the providers searching on their phones for pharmacology.
For my own nursing future, I believe it will make my job easier in terms of finding the necessary information in times that I am unsure. A couple examples are, accessing Epocrates when a patient is on a medication I am unfamiliar with; also, the app for medical Spanish or google translator…I often have patients that have language barriers and with a little help it would make a world of a difference in their understanding and compliance. A downside that I foresee, is having patients feel a false sense of empowerment with the information and they may either incorrectly self-medicate, or they may come in and argue with me or the providers because they are sure they have what they researched on the internet (I have already encountered this).
I feel like I will use technology more in the next few months because just going through the new apps available enticed me to download more and I am excited to try out my new sleep cycle app. I sleep talk and sleep walk so I have Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) and I am curious to see my data charted on this app of how often I stir. I also downloaded Medscape which may come in handy as a quick reference for my triages. I like to look things up and figure things out when they are new, so this app will expedite that.
I feel that the patient portals where they enter their data for blood pressure (BP) and blood sugars (BS) will be very helpful for providers if the patients are completing them correctly. This will eventually become a staple of assessments. The app for continuous heart monitoring will also be a helpful assessment tool.
Managing care at home through mobile technology will be extremely difficult for many people. Patients have difficulty operating their BP and BS monitors, let alone all these different devices. I do, however, feel that where there is a will there is a way and if any individual sees the benefits outweigh the costs, they will make stronger attempts at mastering these new technologies.
The safest way to evaluate the effectiveness of these technological advances is by testing them against evidence based data and our assessment skills. The patients will still need to come in for check-ups, this is not a replacement for face-to-face evaluations, this is just a tracker for continuity of care.
There is plenty of research that has been done to evaluate the effect of technology on patient care. Informatics has been a part of nursing for quite some time and the data is always evaluated as part of the nursing process. The more and more technology that is introduced, the more research will be completed.
As I mentioned before, some of the things I can anticipate as a “con” are the patients’ false sense of completely understanding their healthcare needs, the lack of knowledge on how to use the technology properly, the accuracy of their recordings, the accuracy of our technology for each patient, the lack of face-to-face assessments and treating the individual, and more. Some of the “pros” are the continuity of care, the accessibility to information, the patients’ involvement in their care and the encouragement towards health promotion. More pros are the savings in cost for the patient and healthcare agencies, the patients have access to their records faster, and more.
