Dispatches from the hi-blogs.info krew

TIGER, TIGER, burning bright July 22, 2010

The parallel afternoon sessions are due to start. I am attending a very well-attended session, “The TIGER Initiative: Adoption of Health IT and Meaningful Use for Nurses and Other Disciplines”, a panel presentation and discussion with Patricia Hinton Walker, Vice President for Nursing Policy & Professor of Nursing at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences; Diane J. Skiba, Professor & Health Care Informatics Coordinator, University of Colorado College of Nursing; and Brian Gugerty, Gugerty Consulting, LLC. The session covers reports on TIGER Phases II and III ; specifically, outcomes of the Competencies Collaborative with implications for Education, Faculty Development, and Staff Development, along with progress on the emerging TIGER III, Virtual Learning Environment.

TIGER, for the uninitiated, is “Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform” (http://www.tigersummit.com). The TIGER vision is to allow informatics tools, principles, theories and practices to be used by nurses to make healthcare safer, effective, efficient, patient-centered, timely and equitable; and interweave enabling technologies transparently into nursing practice and education, making information technology the stethoscope for the 21st century.

Patricia started the session by giving an overview of the history of TIGER, especially phases I and II – reports are available at http://www.tigersummit.com/Downloads.html TIGER phase III will focus on implementation, integrating the TIGER recommendations into the nursing community along with colleagues from all disciplines across the continuum of care. These activities are focused on creating a Virtual Learning Center and developing another invitational summit.

Brian Gugerty next gave an overview of the work of nine collaboratives, focusing on the informatics competencies work (http://www.tigersummit.com/Competencies_New_B949.html). Informatics competencies for nurses were seen to be at two levels, ie all practicing and graduating nursing students; and nursing leaders. Existing work in the literature on basic computer competencies and information literacy/management was explored, from an international perspective. Work related to this is available at http://tigercompetencies.pbworks.com/

Diane Skiba talked about the education and faculty development collaborative work – http://www.tigersummit.com/Education_New.html She explored how to engage faculty to move the agenda forward, although noted the difficulties of making changes in higher education. She identified the challenge as that of preparing nurses to practice in a technology-rich world, and addressing areas of both teaching about technology and teaching with technology.

Patricia concluded the presentations by introducing TIGER phase III, which is about dissemination of the results to date of the initiatives and collaboratives, and the development of the virtual learning environment (VLE), as one of several potential solutions to addressing the problems. The VLE work is also beginning to address a wider interdisciplinary audience, including patients and ‘cosnumers’, and not just to nurses.