Colorado Collaborative for Nursing Research: Nurses, Pioneers, Trailblazers

Academic and service leaders in the Colorado healthcare system lament the inability of the nursing profession to assert its place in the evolving world of healthcare. They agree with Tim Porter-O’Grady’s statement that we as nurses are “living in the actual”—the current state of things—rather than “living in the potential”—the state that is yet to come. To drive nursing into the future, the Institute of Medicine (2010) has famously recommended that nurses become more involved in making changes to the healthcare system and use data more effectively. Following the IOM recommendations entails many actions (e.g., forming partnerships between nurse scientists and nurse clinicians). But most importantly, for nursing to blaze its trail into the future, the profession must strike out into the bold new frontier of health care: the volume and variety of data found in the electronic health record (EHR). The EHR is the one-stop change locus where nursing can both help shape the healthcare system and start to use data more efficiently.

This is not to say that nurses do not already employ EHR. We do. But nurse leaders do not yet use EHR data to drive day-to-day decision-making. Nurse clinicians do not yet use EHR data to determine best practices. In short, the nursing profession can exploit the volume and richness of EHR data in much more sophisticated ways.

Therefore, to stay at the forefront of healthcare progress, nursing must (a) explore the intricacy of EHR territory and (b) establish nursing-specific metrics, extract resources from the EHR that are pertinent to those metrics, and develop value-added interventions that yield optimal nursing-sensitive patient outcomes. The best means to those ends is dynamic, intrepid, nursing-centered research.

This symposium will describe a new nurse-empowerment vehicle called the Colorado Collaborative for Nursing Research (CCNR). The objective of the CCNR is to develop and use high-quality, nursing-centered data to do leading-edge, nursing-centered research that guides nursing practice. The CCNR vehicle is driven by forward-looking Nurse Pioneers.

 

• The CCNR slogan is “Nurses Shaping Nursing’s Future,” and Dr. Kathy Oman will discuss how the Nurse Scientist helps accomplish that objective through the CCNR.
• Dr. Cynthia Oster will discuss the challenges of using electronic health record (EHR) elements for research purposes.
• Dr. Blaine Reeder will discuss how the CCNR is leading the effort to develop a distributed data-sharing system. Ultimately, the CCNR—through its CU Patient-initiated Data initiative—will (a) aggregate data from multiple facilities, (b) extract data from the different EHR systems, (c) process those data and translate them into a uniform CCNR nomenclature, and (d) stream data in real time to participating facilities for informed, real-time response.
• Dr. John Welton will discuss one of the current CCNR proofs-of-concept—the Cost & Quality Project. Very little is known about patient-level nursing costs either in individual hospitals or across the spectrum of healthcare. This project uses EHR data to capture direct nursing-care costs per patient.

Nurses must take charge of shaping nursing’s future. The CCNR will help lead the way.