Sat 22 Jul 2006
Saturday, and we are rapidly rushing towards the end of this year’s SINI. The opening session of the day is the Cerner Distinguished Lecture, given by Kathryn Hannah and with the title ‘Lighting the way for modern nurses with nursing informatics’.
As an interesting aside, while we sit here waiting for the start of the session - both Kathryn, and the closing keynote, Jeff Goldsmith, are using Apple Mac machines.
Kathryn was introduced by Charlotte Weaver, from Cerner Corporation. Kathryn revealed that her maiden name was Nightingale, and began her talk by talking about Florence Nightingale’s early work on statistics and hospital design and management.
She began by recapping some of the influences on health services delivery, from new diseases and treatments, rising drug costs, shifts to community-based care, demographic chnages and decreasing proportions of governemtn spending on healthcare. In addition, there are efficiency and effectiveness drivers. This all leads to a super-abundance of data with the growth of the medical literature, moves to lifelong electronic records, and rapidly rising amounts of genetic data.
She pointed out that, while data and information are essential to rational decision making, political decisions influencing health policy are not always rational.
Technorati Tags: SINI2006, Cerner, nursing informatics
2 Responses to “Kathryn Hannah distinguished lecture - part 1”
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July 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I especially enjoyed the early pictures of the nursing informatics “pioneers.” There is a move to capture the history of NI spearheaded by the American Medical Informatics Association Nursing Informatics Working Group (AMIA NI-WG). Bonnie Westra is in charge of this effort assisted by a committee including Scott Erdley and me………………….. Susan
July 25th, 2006 at 8:34 am
As we become more involved in our own care and lifestyle self-management, I can see the health and fitness profession getting invoved in health maintenance in conjunction with healthcare practitioners, just as social care workers looking at welfare are now converging with health. The implication of this is there are yet more professions with whom to develop a common language and intervention recording - because at the moment our systems and the professionals do not ’speak (document) in the same language’. We must look to work together and use the technology to help us, else we will encounter similar probems of mis-interpretation that we did verbally between doctors and nurses many, many years ago!