A $1,500,000 grant has been awarded to the National League for Nursing and three institutions of higher education to fund a five-year Health Information Technologies Scholars (HITS) Project to integrate technology into academic and clinical practice.
The US Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration's Division of Nursing awarded the grant, which will be administered by The School of Nursing at the University of Kansas.
"The ultimate goal of this project is to improve the future workforce by providing them with the knowledge, skills, competencies and attitude to offer safe, quality, and efficient healthcare through the use of technologies," said Beverly Malone, RN, chief executive of NLN.
Other participating schools are the University of Colorado at Denver and the Health Sciences Center at Indiana University.
Mary Anne Rizzolo, RN, NLN, senior director of professional development, member of the project's core management team responsible for planning and implementation, said NLN will create a private e-Community to be used as a central database for documents related to the project and to facilitate communication among the participating faculty and administrations at the three schools of nursing.
The HITS project aims at providing faculty with the knowledge and skills in applied informatics and technology-supported education, to better prepare nurses for clinical practice by helping them develop the competencies required in an information, technology-driven complex healthcare system.
Rizzolo also said the NLN will provide the technology platform, Living Books, which will be used in the early stages of the project to educate the scholars about informatics, simulation, telehealth and Web-based teaching.
The National League of Nursing will disseminate project processes, products and outcomes to provide sustainable and replicable learning models that can be used in other academic settings. On completion of the HITS program, scholars will then be prepared to fill leadership roles in mentoring programs where they will provide the integration of technology at their respective institutions.
An initial call for sponsors on Sept. 19 will kick off the program. Those selected will participate in immersion workshops on one of the three campuses, as well as in online assessment and learning modules, which will incorporate simulated case studies and human patient simulators to provide real-world applications into the academic setting.