User:NursingInformaticsUndergrad/sandbox

''' Technology is Integral to Healthcare '''

At Helene Fuld College of Nursing, nursing students taking the course: Information Technology Applied to Nursing did many modules that helped build critical skills necessary for Informatic Nursing. These critical skills can be viewed in Table 1 of the article Parcells & Locsin, 2011, p. 10 Technological healthcare advances such as vital sign machines, chatbots, digital software, and Electronic Health Records were designed to work in partnership with healthcare providers to provide improved patient outcomes.

The objective of one module was to build a chatbot in order to help patients understand and manage their blood pressure. A patient suffering from blood pressure issues could enter a normal or abnormal blood pressure reading that the chatbot would recognize. It would then provide instructions on what to do and which medications to take based on the patient's doctor-prescribed medication list. The chatbot does this while simultaneously advising and promoting a healthy lifestyle for patients to follow that would lead to greater control and manageability of one's blood pressure.

Creating this chatbot enabled the nursing students to build skill number four in table 1 of Parcells & Locsin, 2011, p. 10 which reads: "Nursing uses unique techniques to care for patients." To be specific, building this chatbot provided an on-the-spot assistant to help patients keep their blood pressure in check. It also helps the patient to stay consistent with a healthcare provider’s recommendations/treatment plans. Providing tips for a healthy lifestyle leads to greater control of patients' blood pressure and quality of life making it the added care that is necessary for Nursing. Using machines this way is something all nurses should feel competent doing, especially Informatics Nurses.

The objective of another module was to conduct a social network analysis using Gephi, a third-party analysis software. By using this software, nursing students were able to import tweets that centered around covid-19 and make them into a graph. The graph was then further analyzed to tabulate network statistics to see how the health literacy of Twitter users may be affected. Nodes and edges appear over time in graph format. Nodes are the Twitter users who made posts containing a covid-19 hashtag. Edges are the connections between each of these Twitter users. Degree centralization is a data statistic that measures how much an “influential node” impacted the network structure. Modularity measures the partitioning in groups vs. the partitioning in-between groups, while the density measures the interconnectivity between all nodes. One student's network analysis can be viewed by opening the image located to the right of the screen labeled Ghephi graph. Doing an analysis like this is very beneficial to nurses because it allows for social insight into how their patients and/or certain populations feel about covid. It also lets nurses know where people may be getting their information from. With these insights, nurses can better understand why their patients may feel a certain way towards covid. Then they can find ways to address certain covid related concerns while debunking fake facts to help people gain true knowledge about the virus and its vaccine.

The necessary skills learned in this module fall under number eight in Table 1 of the article first mentioned. It reads "Nursing is a unique study of knowledge, skills, and abilities to care" Gephi, being a third-party software, can only be used by nurses with the skills to utilize basic knowledge of how to produce accurate statistical data from social media sites. Lastly, they must possess the ability needed to interpret these analyses in ways that are likely to improve patient outcomes.

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