Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Science (NKBDS) working groups convene annually in Minneapolis, MN, in June. The open conference attracts nurse leaders from a variety of specializations, including informatics, practice, policy, public health, leadership, education, and research.1 Conference attendees share a common vision of improving the health of individuals, families, communities, and populations through the standardization and integration of electronic health records and ancillary information systems. Over the last 7 years, the mission of the NKBDS initiative has been to develop a strategy for achieving "shareable and comparable"2(p473) nursing data to be integrated at the point of care, both at the bedside and in the community.
The mobile health (mHealth) working group is 1 of 10 working groups of the NKBDS initiative founded in 2015 by Vicky Tiase, MSN, RN-BC, FAMIA, and Robin Austin, PhD, DNP, DC, RN-BC. Tiase wanted to "ensure that patient-generated data was not left out of the [NKBDS] initiative" (V. Tiase, personal communication, March 27, 2019), and Austin was interested in "identifying emerging technologies and learning how to best integrate them into nursing workflow" (R. Austin, personal communication, April 5, 2019). The initial purpose of the working group was to better understand the intersection of mHealth data, nursing, and patient care. Under the coleadership of Tiase and Austin in 2015-2016, 10 working group members sought to define mHealth and its role in big data and developed use case scenarios to better understand the role of digital tools at the bedside. Cochairs, Lily Tunby, DNP, RN, and Christie Martin, MN, MPH, RN, PHN, LHIT-HP, continued these efforts in 2016-2017.
In 2017, under the leadership of Martin and Tunby, a decision was made by NKBDS leadership to explore the topic of pain and its unifying role across all working groups: Care Coordination, Clinical Data Analytics, Context of Care, Education, Encoding and Modeling, Engage and Equip All Nurses in Health IT Policy, Mobile Health for Nursing, Nursing Value, Social Determinants of Health, and Transforming Documentation. In an effort to better understand the state of the science of mHealth interventions and pain management, an mHealth subcommittee comprised of 8 individuals decided to conduct a literature review. This team of nurse informaticists, public health nurses, academics, and nurse researchers agreed on a research question and search strategy, created a tool to review abstracts and full texts based on eligibility criteria, and conducted initial data abstraction on articles from one database in advance of the sixth annual conference in June 2018, when Lisa Janeway, DNP, RN-BC, CPHIMS, joined Martin as cochair.
The literature review persists under the coleadership of Janeway and Martin. In early 2019, an associate librarian at the University of Minnesota who specializes in systematic reviews and data management joined the team and expanded the repository of full texts by searching additional databases. This was to capture ongoing research in the field since the start of the project. Currently, the working group is at the stage of reviewing additional abstracts and full texts and hopes to start writing a manuscript by the end of 2019.
In addition to this endeavor, many working group members continue to make strides to advance mHealth by designing health-related applications, developing applications used to capture nursing data via digitals tools that integrate with the electronic health records, creating mHealth curricula, and teaching future nursing informaticists about the role of mHealth technologies in nursing care. Demonstrated by these accomplishments, the goals of the group have not changed since its inception, and the group remains dedicated to the mission of the NKBDS conference to improve health outcomes by further exploring how to best integrate mHealth tools at the point of care. Future work may include developing evidence-based digital guidelines that align with recent health information technology policy changes set forth by the 21st Century Cures Act. The 2018-2019 report highlighting the group's work can be found at https://www.nursing.umn.edu/sites/nursing.umn.edu/files/mhealth_2018-2019.pdf.
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