UWM College of Nursing Leads Local Research to Improve Nursing Care at Bedside

The academic, corporate and health care worlds came together at the College of Nursing in 2003-2004 to promote adoption of higher nursing standards, improve patient care, and reduce costs through nursing informatics.

A collaborative project, launched in April 2004, joins three entities: the UWM College of Nursing, Aurora Health Care, and Cerner Corporation -- a Kansas City company that is a leading supplier of health care technology worldwide. In short, nurses at some Aurora facilities will capture patient care information using Cerner’s technology; then the College of Nursing will analyze it and make suggestions for improvement.

“By combing through the data, we expect to be able to determine how nursing care impacts length of stay and overall costs of care,” says Judy Murphy, Aurora’s director of information services. “Then we can improve on best practices systemwide and nationwide.”

Norma Lang, PhD, RN, FAAN, FRCN, will lead the research effort as a UWM visiting research professor. Lang -- a former dean at the UWM College of Nursing and the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania -- is internationally known for establishing methods with which to measure nursing quality. She has been honored by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations with the prestigious Codman Award for championing the use of outcomes to improve patient care.

According to UWM College of Nursing Dean Sally Lundeen, such high-level scrutiny of nursing care’s impact is rare. “Much of the work that nurses do – educating patients about their condition, coordinating care with other medical and social agencies, helping families and patients deal with stress, and promoting preventive care – isn't captured in current patient records systems,” says Lundeen. “By developing ways to capture it, researchers will be able to make links between the work of nurses and the outcomes for patients, then find ways to improve these outcomes.”

The project will initially focus on nursing care for congestive heart failure patients -- who typically have long and costly hospital stays – then expand to other populations in and out of hospital settings.

The Cerner information system adopted by Aurora includes content for specific client populations and is customized to the nurses’ workflow. Plus, computer screens alert nurses to new care instructions, test results as they become available, and other developments that require a nurse’s attention. The system will provide nurses with instant access to the best evidence available to aid in clinical decision-making at the bedside. The system, which is being developed by the UWM, Cerner, and Aurora research team, also will link nursing data to client outcomes.