Kaminski, J. (Feb. 2018). OJNI adds spark in line with the excitement of HIMSS18! Online Journal of Nursing Informatics (OJNI), 22(1). Available at http://www.himss.org/ojni
HIMSS18 is just around the corner, and the OJNI is thrilled to be launching our first issue of the year in tandem with this popular and cutting-edge conference! HIMSS is deliberately aligning the publication of this issue with the launch of HIMSS18, which helps all of us at OJNI to feel acknowledged and supported. 2018 brings us to our 22nd year of online publication in the wonderful and continually evolving world of nursing and health informatics. This is another reason we feel like celebrating!
Our line-up for this issue is both diverse and inspiring. The focus of each paper offers a thoughtful addition to the nursing informatics body of knowledge. We hope you will enjoy reading our latest articles which include:
Suzanne Fredericks, Jennifer Lapum, and Franklin Gorospe’s review of the use of health-related gaming as an alternative medium for the delivery of patient education materials, particularly for patients with congenital heart disease. Their robust review of the literature presents a great snapshot of how gaming is currently used in the field, and suggests there is room for much more work in this area to support patient education.
Haresh Bhatia, Neal Patel, Catherine Ivory, Phillip Stewart, Kim Unertl and Christoph Lehmann used an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to collect medication process data using ordering, scheduling, and administration timestamps to determine the current state of the hospital medication process. This study highlights the importance of working with big data stored within data warehouses and the move towards applying data analytics to analyze workflow and process in nursing and healthcare in general.
Kimberly Powell and Carole Myers conducted a qualitative study to explore the perceptions of providers and patients on using patient portals to support chronic disease management. Their study pinpoints the need for orientation, training, and support for patients who are learning to use available portals to encourage more consistent use. It also highlights the need for providers to maximize their use of portal capabilities to fully offer valuable tools to patients living with chronic illnesses.
Nancy Laplante, Phillip Laplante and Jeffrey Voas present a fascinating analysis of how the Internet of Things (IoT) can facilitate disaster response training for interprofessional nursing education. They point out that the Internet of Things “has promised to create many opportunities for enhancing human lives, and although IoT has gained in popularity, nursing has been slow to adopt these technologies, in particular with regard to undergraduate nursing education” (p. 1).
As well, Phillip Shields presents his doctoral study where he analyzed the process semantics used by front-line nurses in four different areas of nursing, from the involved nurses’ perspective. In his own words, “The motivation for this pilot study was to find a way for nurses, who are not experts in knowledge acquisition or ontologies, to impart process semantics that could be used to fill the lack of tacit semantics in other areas of nursing. Underpinning this study is the notion that process semantics will be more “accurate” if they are sourced directly from the nurses who use them daily. The study found that simple graphing software such as VUE is a useful “stand-alone” knowledge acquisition tool for the visualization of semantics forming the basis of the process domain from the nurse’s perspective. The nurse’s graphs were used to construct OWL-DL ontologies. It followed that semantics in ontologies, from the original nurse’s graphs, can be evaluated by an automated agent and may produce useful information” (p. 21).
A final highlight of this edition is the recognition of a well-respected nursing informatics scholar, Dr. Kathleen Hunter by awarding her with the Virtual OJNI Gold Nursing Informatics Award. This award is in recognition of Dr. Hunter’s continued contributions to the advancement of nursing informatics and was granted by OJNI on behalf of Chamberlain University. This particular award is also significant since Dr. Hunter will be the final recipient of the OJNI awards program which will be retired in 2018.
We hope you enjoy this wonderful collection of nursing informatics scholarship, and that many of you will also partake in the exciting and memorable experience of HIMSS18!