By Andre Kushniruk, BSc, BA, MSc, PhD
Patient records are going digital and nurses are increasingly interacting with electronic health records and related technologies. Research in the School of Health Information Science and the School of Nursing at UVic is helping to ease the transition for nurses as they use these technologies. Health information scientists, Drs. Elizabeth Borycki and Andre Kushniruk, and their team of researchers have been educating nursing students (and related health professional students) about the new technology, and allowing students and faculty access to a range of electronic patient records. This work lead to the development of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) Educational Portal, designed to house a number of working electronic health record systems that can be remotely accessed and tested out by students from anywhere in the world for educational purposes. At the University of Victoria, several hundred nursing students have been exposed to electronic health records made available this way to learn about how this technology will shape their future practice and to learn the best ways to adapt to and incorporate electronic health records into practice. In closely related work, both Drs. Borycki and Kushniruk are working on creating low-cost clinical simulations to test the usability and effectiveness of information systems used by nurses. This work has also lead to new ways to both train nurses in using technology as well as new ways to predict a range of errors that may be inadvertently “induced” by using the technology (“technology-induced errors”). This work is used worldwide to refine and improve a range of information systems designed for nurses as well as to improve training of nurses who are adopting these systems in live healthcare settings.
Andre Kushniruk is a Professor at the University of Victoria School of Health Information Science and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
From the 2012 Spring Communiqué — Informatics
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