Nanotechnology: the coming revolution and its implications for consumers, clinicians, and informatics.

Nanotechnology promises to revolutionize manufactured materials as we know them, creating a vast array of new products, drug delivery devices, and monitoring mechanisms. The promise of these products and devices is tremendous. Likewise, the implications of this technology are immense, ranging across consumers, clinicians, and the practice of informatics. Specific implications include opportunities for education of health care consumers and clinicians about the safe and ethical use of nanomaterials, a requirement for new policies and regulations, potential radical role changes for both consumers and clinicians, and new demands in the practice of informatics. The most pressing concern for health applications is the safe use of nanomaterials. Given the promise of nanomaterials and the implications across at least these 3 areas, nurses need to understand the capabilities and limitations of nanomaterials, proceed with reasoned caution, and plan now for its wide-ranging impacts.

Sharing intellectual and social capital: A partnership to advance informatics and foster consumer centric care.

The need to educate the nursing workforce about using informatics tools to provide safe, quality consumer centric care is of utmost importance. A unique and strategic partnership was established to address this challenge. The informatics specialty option at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center School of Nursing has joined forces with McKesson Corporation. The overall goal of this partnership is to provide leadership in the field of nursing informatics and the further development of nursing informatics as a discipline. This paper describes the converging forces that serve as a foundation for the partnership. There are also descriptions of the two partners and their shared goals. This partnership was designed to share intellectual and social capital to advance nursing informatics through educational and research opportunities. The partnership also allows for the use of intellectual capital to brainstorm new developments, designs and to test the usability of new products. This paper reports on the various projects underway in the area of education, scholarship, research and development.