The Learning Health System, a concept and a method to improve individual and population health, has since 2007 become widely recognized and increasingly adopted around the world. This presentation will introduce the Learning Health System, describe its current status, and distinguish it from other approaches to health improvement.

With changes in the health IT policy landscape, digital health technologies are providing new data sets requiring integration into clinical practice. Examples are patient-generated health data, patient-reported outcomes, social determinants of health data, and environmental data. These data can be used to inform new models of care and support patient-centered decision-making. However, in order to realize benefits, data must be translated to information, contextualized to the decision-making process, and integrated into nursing workflows. Digital Health presents opportunities for nurse informaticists. There are unanswered questions on the readiness of patients and caregivers to share these data and the state of health IT systems to integrate digital health data. New methods for data visualization and contextualization must be explored to support the information seeking practices of clinicians. The connection of digital health data sources to improved patient outcomes is in its infancy. Future informatics work is needed to fully realize the impact of digital health on nursing practice.

This panel presentation will provide an update on activities surrounding the reduction of documentation burden in the electronic health record. Recent national level initiatives that span all disciplines and have contributed to a growing body of knowledge will be reviewed along with a call for action and involvement. These include the work conducted over the last couple of years by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, Office of the National Coordinator, American Medical Informatics Association, Health Level 7, and Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science Transforming Documentation Workgroup at the University of Minnesota. Front-line success stories and lessons learned will be provided for both the ambulatory and inpatient settings using current ongoing projects conducted in two healthcare systems.

The incidence of head and neck cancer has markedly increased over the last three decades due to the human papillomavirus (HPV) related cancer. These cancers afford a better prognosis than their smoking related cancers and affect a younger patient population. The morbidity of this treatment has significant treatment related side effects that have a life-long impact on patients. Emerging technologies, including robotic surgery, have offered a new minimally invasive surgical approach to these cancers and may afford the opportunity to improve functional outcomes and preserve an excellent oncologic outcome. We aim to review the comprehensive interprofessional team that is incorporating and delivering this new technology for the treatment of this rapidly growing disease.

The past few years have been challenging for the healthcare workforce and the current state of recruitment, retention, and pipeline opportunities for nursing are in a critical state. The resolution of that distress will require new, multifactorial approaches problem-solving, but increasing efficiency and maximizing each individual nurse’s potential will be absolutely necessary as we look to do “more with less.” Any path towards the future of nursing practice should rest upon a transformed approach to leveraging technology education as a core component of nursing practice as well as an engagement, recruitment, and retention tool for nurses at the bedside. This session will focus on the role of informatics as we move towards our future state. We will discuss the use of novel informatics education practices in the postgraduate, non-academic domain (i.e., a facility-based practice setting). We will review opportunities in academia to integrate informatics concepts in legacy education and discuss non-standard pathways to recognition of informatics knowledge. Finally, we will review some of the structural changes needed for operational partners to integrate informatics in novel ways - position descriptions, residency programs, clinical ladders, pathways to protected time, etc.

Attendees will learn how a variety of data can be leveraged through health information exchange in order to promote population health. This session will include background information about the Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP) with a particular focus on work performed in the Maryland region. The session will also provide an overview of a variety of CRISP tools and use cases in support of population health ranging from care coordination, transitional care, quality improvement and more. Examples of CRISP tools that will be shared include Encounter Notification Services to advance transitional care management and care coordination, Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) to improve appropriate prescribing, administrative claims data reporting to understand population health program participation and intervention evaluation and COVID-19 reports to support pandemic response. The session will conclude with a discussion of future initiatives.”

This innovative and translational presentation will include aspects such as the mechanisms of virtual reality applied to acute and chronic pain, the search for the optimal virtual reality controls and the applications of virtual reality as an adjuvant treatment. This intervention was delivered to participants suffering from chronic pain to be used directly at home to relieve pain, anxiety, improve mood and sleep.