NU 501, Nursing Informatics, Assignment 5, Grade A
You did an excellent job with your Blog! The content is thorough and describes many aspects for nurses that deal with end of life issues. The appearance is well organized and easy to read. The font and color were also appealing and easy to read. Your content is provocative and through provoking in an area that needs much attention and gets very little. Nice job!
I first proposed developing my other blog to complete the final project requirements back at the start of the course, and promptly got the go-ahead from Sharon, my instructor:
On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Holly XXXXX wrote:Oops. Here's what I replied:
Hi Jerry,
I was just reviewing your course progress and noticed that Unit IV is missing….please contact me soon. We are also still waiting for your official transcripts the University of Mass @ Boston.
~Holly
Holly XXXXX, Academic Advisor
Saint Joseph's College of Maine
Graduate and Professional Studies
Jerry Soucy to Holly XXXXX, Sharon XXXXXX
Dec 17
Hi, Holly:
I submitted the Unit V assignment earlier this week, and noted to Sharon in the accompanying email that I had leapfrogged Unit IV to submit a written report to accompany my final project. I'm working on the Unit IV assignment - a research paper that complies with APA formatting requorements - but it's proven to be a long, hard slog.So, I'll let the chips fall where they fall, and will get back to wrapping up that APA-formatted paper right after I post this material.
Sharon approved my final project proposal early in the course, and since the project has been ongoing (see it here), I was in a better position to develop the project report quickly. I didn't want to be sitting here with two missing assignments at this point.
I haven't heard back from Sharon yet - either her feedback on the project report, or her response to my leapfrogging Unit IV.
I'll follow up with UMass/Boston and my transcript request after the holidays.
Thanks, Jerry
This chart above shows blog traffic, as a measure of all visitors who’ve come to the blog during the identified date range. The large spike on the right labeled December 2 indicates the substantial boost in traffic as a result of hosting Palliative Care Grand Rounds for December. Those visitors were pointed to my blog by several other blogs. This chart also notes a total of 1,167 visits for the measured period, along with a calculated daily average.
This second chart also shows blog traffic, though this time as a measure of the unique visitors during the date range. The distinction is a subtle but important one, as it counts each unique visitor only once, regardless of the number of return visits any one visitor may have made in a given day. The large spike on the right labeled December 2 again indicates the substantial boost in traffic as a result of hosting Palliative Care Grand Rounds for December.
Here are the top ten (10) referral sources to my blog. The sources numbered 2, 3, 4, 7, and 10 are other blogs. Source #9 is the nursing student/faculty communication site at a local community college where I recently taught 2 classes. Source #1 is actually not a source, and indicates that 127 of the 528 tracked visits arrived directly at the blog without benefit of a referral. The 3+ minute average time on the site is a fair measure of site ‘stickiness,’ and indicates that visitors stay at the blog long enough to read the relatively short posts. The majority of the visits for this time period were by people who had not previously been to the blog, and the bounce rate indicates that the majority of readers did not explore multiple posts.
This chart shows the top 25 referring sites for a different time period.
NU 501, Nursing Informatics, Assignment 3, Grade A
In this assignment you demonstrated an understanding of the information systems in your institution and how they are integrated. You described the systems involved thoroughly and in an organized manner. Isn’t it amazing the number of applications there are and how at least some of them are able to communicate and share data with each other? I really enjoyed reading about your previous experiences and the historical perspective of some of the IT activities in the Boston area. One of the best papers I have read!
source 2008 AnnualReport, Partners HealthCare (pdf)
“The data management and communications needs of clinical care and health care management were quite different from the business batch processing and large scale scientific computation tasks that had dominated the software system design thinking of the previous decade. The lesson…was that software systems should be designed to fit the paradigms of information usage in medical applications, instead of medical applications being twisted and stretched to fit batch processing paradigms.”
"...the talent involved in the founding of MEDITECH is astronomical. These are some very, very smart and successful people who made extensive contributions...I'm in awe of the influence these pioneers have had, not only in healthcare automation, but in healthcare in general...the story of MEDITECH and its founders is, to me, the most fascinating and awe-inspiring of any firm in our industry. Someone should write a book."
“On the basis of responses from 63.1% of hospitals surveyed, only 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have a comprehensive electronic-records system (i.e., present in all clinical units), and an additional 7.6% have a basic system (i.e., present in at least one clinical unit). Computerized provider-order entry for medications has been implemented in only 17% of hospitals.”
source 2008 AnnualReport, Partners HealthCare (pdf)
We have the December slot (for Palliative Care Grand Rounds) open if you think your Death Club blog would be up for it?
Great job writing so far. I have been meaning to highlight a few of your posts but have not gotten to it yet. I plan on submitting some for the upcoming PC Grand Rounds at Geripal.
I tried to think what could be accomplished in this visit. She was in good condition for her age, but she faced everything from advancing arthritis and incontinence to what might be metastatic colon cancer. It seemed to me that, with just a forty-minute visit, Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening problem (the possible metastasis) or the problem that bothered her the most (the back pain). But this was evidently not what he thought. He asked almost nothing about either issue. Instead, he spent much of the exam looking at her feet.- - - - -
“Is that really necessary?” she asked, when he instructed her to take off her shoes and socks.
“Yes,” he said. After she’d left, he told me, “You must always examine the feet.” He described a bow-tied gentleman who seemed dapper and fit, until his feet revealed the truth: he couldn’t bend down to reach them, and they turned out not to have been cleaned in weeks, suggesting neglect and real danger.
Gavrilles had difficulty taking her shoes off, and, after watching her struggle a bit, Bludau leaned in to help. When he got her socks off, he took her feet in his hands, one at a time. He inspected them inch by inch—the soles, the toes, the web spaces. Then he helped her get her socks and shoes back on and gave her and her daughter his assessment.
from “The Way We Age Now” by Atul Gawande
"Assignment 2, Grade A
You did an excellent job with this assignment. You demonstrated proficiency in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Your proposal was clear, concise and compelling and was supported by data. I liked you format it (sic) posed and answered questions that come up during presentations of proposals. I also liked your creative approach. You did a great job with the Excel spreadsheet using formulas appropriately to calculate costs and percentages. I liked your PowerPoint presentation it had an appropriate background and was very readable."
So, let's get down to bidness... 
Our Department's goal, as stated by Jane Hamsher, RN, Senior Vice President for Nursing and Patient Care Services, is “to exceed 95% patient satisfaction in all categories, each and every month.”“Thank you for taking the time to make sure that my husband and I both understood his medications, and for giving us a specific way to organize them. I was very nervous about the thought of him coming home, and me not being able to make sure that he took them on time. God bless you.”
“I was very afraid that I would not be able to manage my pain at home, and that I would end up being 'zonked out' on too many medications. Now I know how to help myself relax with some simple techniques, and that will help me a lot. Thanks!”
“You nurses are terrific. Nobody every talked to me before in a language that I could understand, or took the time to answer my questions, but you sure did. I feel much more comfortable about going home now.”
As Pavlov said, "Does the term 'no-brainer' ring a bell?"Addendum - I haven't bought a copy of Microsoft Office since about 1999 or so, when I picked up a gray market CD of Office 97 on eBay for $20. I've re-installed it on my latest computer, so that I can double-check the assignment files I've written in OpenOffice before turning them in.
As for the use of PowerPoint, well, let's just say that my opinion of the tool is entirely consistent with Edward Tufte's. As Tufte said in an essay that appeared in a 2003 issue of Wired magazine:
"The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch...PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?"
For anybody who might be interested - here's Edward Tufte's own site.
I seriously recommend him and his work to anyone who's planning to teach, or who otherwise might need to provide others with information through a report or presentation.
I stumbled across Tufte while doing an online search for information that was critical of PowerPoint. He conducts workshops in major cities throughout the country, and I attended one last year when he came to Boston. It literally changed my professional life.
I also recommend this article by Ian Parker, which appeared in a 2001 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
"The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.Less PowerPoint! More teaching and learning!
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world."
NailedLooking ahead to the final project for Unit 5, I propose one along the lines of option #4, specifically a project that integrates information technology into my practice to benefit colleagues and patients, and that contributes to my professional growth. I propose to further develop a blog that I began in February on end of life care and nursing education. It's available for your initial review here.Her response was prompt and direct:
If you think this is a viable final project, I'll develop a more detailed set of objectives and evaluation criteria for us to review. One of my goals in starting that site was to fold it into my school work. Another was to develop it as a support tool for a project at work to develop an end of life care team on my unit.
I look forward to hearing your feedback on this idea.
My subsequent response:
That sounds like a very intriguing idea for your last assignment. I think it will be fine, and I am looking forward to viewing it. Thanks
Great. Thanks.I'll provide those details here when I submit them, but if anybody's interested and wants to do something similar - just get a free Blogger Account and jump right in.
I'll provide some supporting information, including objectives, methods, and assessments when I submit it as my final project.
NU 501, Nursing Informatics, Assignment 1, Grade A. You did an excellent job with Assignment 1! You demonstrated that you could surf the web and find some interesting web sites. You were able to use criteria to evaluate the web sites logically and clearly. The web sites you found were very informative and I could see where they would be useful in your practice. You were very thorough and I enjoyed reading about the sites you chose. You did a great job posting your favorite website to the discussion board.And, just for posterity's sake, here's what I posted to the course discussion board:
One assignment down, four more to go for the course. Once this course is done, just thirteen left for that credential declaring me a master.
Well, this one seems easy enough...
The purpose of this report is consistent with that of other national health care surveys conducted by NCHS, specifically “to answer key questions of interest to health care policy makers, public health professionals, and researchers. These can include the factors that influence the use of health care resources, the quality of health care, including safety, and disparities in health care services provided to population subgroups in the United States.”
