Creating Case Studies for Digital Health and Technology Competency in Nursing.

BACKGROUND: Nursing programs and their faculty must ensure that graduates have the informatics, digital health, and health care technologies competencies needed by health systems. PROBLEM: A gap exists in nursing faculty knowledge, skills, and abilities for incorporating informatics, digital health, and technologies across curricula because of low focus on this area in faculty development initiatives and rapid adoption and evolution of technologies in health care systems. APPROACH: The Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science initiative Education Subgroup used a process to create case studies for including informatics, digital health, and the concomitant clinical reasoning/critical thinking competencies across curricula. OUTCOMES: Three case study examples were created using the process. CONCLUSIONS: The process for creating case studies that incorporate required informatics, digital health, and health care technologies can be used by nursing educators for teaching across their curricula and to assess student competency.

A Review of Clinical Informatics Competencies in Nursing to Inform Best Practices in Education and Nurse Faculty Development.

AIM: The aim of this literature review was to determine the state of the science related to clinical informatics competencies of registered nurses and to determine best practices in educational strategies for both nursing students and faculty. BACKGROUND: Continued emphasis on the provision of evidence-based patient care has implications for requisite informatics-focused competencies to be threaded throughout all levels of nursing educational programs. METHOD: Whittemore and Knalf's five-step integrative review process guided this research. An extensive search yielded 69 publications for critical appraisal. RESULTS: Results suggest nursing educational programs do not adhere to standardized criteria for teaching nursing informatics competencies. Another identified literature gap was the scarcity of research related to informatics training requirements for nurse educators. CONCLUSION: Findings support the need for continued research to provide clear direction about the expected clinical informatics competencies of graduate nurses and what training faculty need to facilitate student learning.

Differentiated thyroid cancer: role of the lymph node dissection.

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy with the highest mortality, so it has generated considerable debate and voluminous literature by endocrinologists, surgeons, and nuclear physicians. If total thyroidectomy is the primary treatment for patients with differentiated thyroid cancers (DTC) and it has proven to be effective and safe, the extent of lymph nodes dissection remains controversial among experts in the field. This controversy persists largely due to the lack of a prospective randomized controlled trial to define whether the addition of central lymph node dissection (CLND) to total thyroidectomy for papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) confers an increased risk of permanent hypoparathyroidism and permanent nerve injury. According to the Consensus Conference of the UEC's Club therapeutic modified radical neck dissection (MRND) should be performed only in the patients with evidence of neoplastic multiple lymph node involvement. Although central lymph node dissection may increase the risk of hypoparathyroidism and nerve injury when compared with total thyroidectomy without CLND, it may decrease recurrence of PTC and likely improves disease specific survival and offers a sufficient alternative to routine prophylactic modified radical neck dissection. Selective central lymph node dissection should be performed, under the care of experienced surgeons, in high risk patients (50 years or older aged, large tumor expansion within the thyroid, or with extrathyroid extension), with the extension to the station II-III-IV in case of single lymph node involvement.