Telehealth Nursing: Application of Usability Methods to Maximize Quality Patient Outcomes
Date
2015-02-11
Authors
Tuden, Danica
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
InspireNet
Abstract
Telehealth nursing is a unique area of nursing practice that has emerged in response to the development of new technologies as well as consumer demand for better access to health care services in the community. Telehealth nursing or telenursing, can be defined as the delivery, management and coordination of care and services provided to individuals via telecommunication technology within the domain of nursing (Arnaert & Macfarlane, 2011). Telehealth nursing is very distinct in how care is delivered in that telenurses are limited with respect to the quantity and quality of information they receive from callers in order to provide appropriate recommendations. Therefore, the health information systems that telenurses use to do their job appropriately need to be both useful and usable. The purpose of this presentation is to describe telehealth nursing and how usability engineering methodologies play a key role in ensuring that these systems meet the needs of telenurses to ensure quality patient outcomes.
Description
Danica Tuden is a Clinical Analyst/User Experience Specialist. She has also been a registered nurse for over 25 years, practicing in a variety of settings such as acute care, community health senior’s assisted living and telehealth nursing. The move to telenursing was important to her decision to pursue a master’s degree in Health Information Science at the University of Victoria in BC. During this education, she became very interested and passionate in the area of usability engineering methodologies, particularly in usability testing and heuristic evaluation. Danica’s thesis is concerned with developing a framework to support telenurse practice and in doing so, uses clinical simulation and a post cued recall approach interview as the basis for her data collection in order to understand telenurse’s decision making processes.
Danica will be speaking about telehealth nursing and how usability methods are important to utilize in the SDLC (systems development life cycle) of the EMR (electronic medical record) and clinical decision support tool that telenurses use during a patient call encounter.
Danica currently works at Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) as clinical analyst, particularly in the electronic medical record and clinical documentation components of Cerner applications. She has also worked at IBM and HealthlinkBC in the area of usability.
References:
1) Arnaert, A. & Macfarlane, F. (2011). Telehealth nursing in Canada: Opportunities for nurses to shape the future. McGill University, University Street: Wilson Hall.
Keywords
Citation
Tuden, D. Telehealth Nursing: Application of Usability Methods to Maximize Quality Patient Outcomes. [Web Recording].