Discussion Question 1: Compare and contrast the various ways you can access information delivering professional continuing education. Explore any relationships between technology and learning and evaluate which works best for you

Assignment: Expert Answer and Explanation

Shared Clinical Information Systems

Technology advancement has changed how care is provided in different settings. Each of the diverse clinical settings has its own unique features, which might need to be captured to come up with effective clinical system designs. In this paper, two diverse clinical settings will be evaluated, and based on their unique characteristics, consideration of shared clinical information systems will be provided. The two clinical settings are sports medicine and nursing home.

Comparison of the Clinical Settings

McGonigle and Mastrian (2017) define health data and information as patient data collected to facilitate sound decision making. The authors also state that health data comprises care management data like details of patient visitations, medication reconciliation, directives, and consents (Pg. 710). Most of the health data collected are unique to the type of patients and setting in which it is collected. The quality of health data and information collected has an impact on the quality of clinical decisions to be made.

Starting with sports medicine, this is a line of clinical care that focuses on improving an athlete’s performance. Sports medicine also deals with the treatment and prevention of injury. In contrast, nursing homes are facilities that provide care for patients who do not prefer to be in hospitals and are still not capable of performing self-care.

For nursing homes, the patients are centralized in one location, with the nurses having easy access to the patients and the facilities needed for data collection, for example, diagnostic data. The same may not be the case for sports medicine, where the patient may at times be tended to offsite, meaning that clinical data for the patient may be collected offsite, then taken to a facility for analysis. In both settings, the value of information is more or less the same, especially when it comes to decision making.

However, in nursing homes, given the fragile state of the patients, then collection and analysis of information will be needed for faster decision-making. The decision support needed in both settings also varies based on the nature of patients served. For example, in nursing homes, decision support is required for routine nursing activities and prevention of sentinel events, like medication errors (Islam et al., 2018), while in sports medicine, the decision support

Justification of the Clinical Elements

Some of the clinical elements necessary in both settings include the patient’s personal and clinical data. This is an essential component that will be used to facilitate the clinical system to provide useful information that can support clinical decision-making. Examples of clinical data to be used include the heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, patient’s temperature, among others (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017). Another clinical element is patient-specific education materials.

This is because the nature of patients being taken care of, in most cases, have unique education needs to be captured by the clinical system. In both settings, a medication list repository containing patients’ active medication list, medication interactions, including possible allergic reactions also needs to be present to prevent any adverse outcomes from the decisions facilitated by the clinical system. Another necessary element is staff knowledge, whereby, the nursing staff and other users of the clinical system will be required to possess some form of knowledge on how to apply the clinical system.

In both sports medicine and nursing homes, the use of EMRs helps to simplify data collection. However, one of the differences is that in sports medicine, EMR records need to be accessed in real-time from a remote location, preferably with an integrated notification system, accessible to the patient care provider and the facility (Shrier et al., 2014). This is a feature that needs to be captured in the design of a shared system. The information collected in both settings is usually stored in data warehouses based on the quantity of data involved.

The storage, security, and access aspects of the data is a factor that needs to also be captured when establishing a data warehouse for the new shared system. The regional and national health information network (NHIN) integrate the various data warehouses into one system that can be accessed, with permission, by care providers in different locations and even in different health care organizations (Ruley et al., 2018). The need for such integration is higher in sports medicine than it is in nursing homes. However, such integration can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the shared system.

Justification