N6004-Module 5 July 18, 2011-Hawkins, Marie

N6004 Module 5 Blog July 19, 2011-Hawkins_Marie

As a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner clinical decision making particularly decision trees are utilized for determining psychiatric disorders and differential diagnosis as well as pharmacology decisions. The DSM IV is a clinical diagnostic guideline that is good, yet it is very painstaking and heavy to cart around. Nursing does have computer preceptors but they are not all encompassing. Having a computer-generated system would be very beneficial because thanks to the rapid changes in health care due to research nursing needs to keep up on the latest care particularly in specialty areas.

To obtain the latest information rapidly is essential. As  Brokel, (2009), aptly states if nurses do not have the resources available then the inability to make a decision and provide care in a timely manner is difficult.

A good example of using a computer diagnostic system (CDS) would be a pharmacotherapy system. This type CDS known as drug databases decreases the chances of medication error. Further it explains drug-to drug-interaction, appropriate dosing, and recommendation for laboratory or diagnostic testing. Testing is important for maintaining a therapeutic level and to prevent systems damage

Even though nursing diagnostic systems are behind the medical counterparts I believe this will change rapidly in the upcoming years. With each generation comes growth and the next generation is very computer savvy. Nursing should expect great additions to providing best evidence based care at a rapid pace (Anderson., 2008.

With CDSS technology health care practice diminishes costly errors. Heuristics and bias are necessary to keep in mind. It is easy to follow the crowd because “we’ve always done it that way” but given new knowledge as explained by Tversky & Kahneman (1974), I will be looking at my decision making through different lenses. One area of clinical decision making that is biased and unchangeable is the human touch as best practice care because it never fails.

References

Anderson., J., Willson, P. (2008). Clinical decision support systems in nursing: synthesis of science for evidence-based practice. Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 26(3), 151-158.

Brokel, J. (2009). Infusing clinical decision support interventions into electronic health records. [Journal]. Urological nuring, 29(5), 345-353.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgement and uncertainty heuristics and biases. [Journal]. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.