Nursing Lesson Plan for Health Information Technology Adoption

Introduction

Designing a lesson plan for a student body engaged in education toward effective healthcare provision — in a context of evolving technological and legal requirements — must incorporate both the values and procedures that have become standardized and the continually shifting paradigm for best practices in the field. The lesson plan and relevant literature discussed here are intended to establish this balance.

The content and strategy presented hereafter is informed by the literature and current realities emerging from the field, establishing a three-hour class that stresses the importance of high-quality healthcare and the manner in which effective information management contributes directly to it. A course intended to provide introductory information and context for continuing studies in the field of Health Information Management (HIM) will be substantially shaped by its three-hour duration and its target audience of entering students, as demonstrated by this discussion.

To this end, the course focuses on introducing students to the various approaches and methodologies they will be expected to learn and apply throughout their collective curriculum. The emphasis is on creating modern healthcare professionals who are skilled both in the traditional values of nursing and in those pertaining to the use of newly sophisticated information technology and data management. As the lesson plan asserts, there is distinct value in creating a new generation of healthcare professionals who possess technological proficiency equal to the necessary physiological and psychological skills.

Educational Need, Rationale, and Learner Outcomes

The field of healthcare is in a state of evolution, as are most professions in light of recent technological developments. Primary among these developments is the use of information technology as a way of driving safer, faster, and more efficient access to information. This in turn creates a healthcare professional who is less constrained by time pressures and staff shortages. It also helps create a level of informational consistency across an organization, preventing data bottlenecks that can cause critical delays in delivering crucial treatment.

Naturally, technological advances alone cannot improve the quality of healthcare provision. Effective application of the technology by qualified healthcare professionals is essential. Therefore, the present lesson plan is driven by the educational need to create a new generation of healthcare professionals who are comfortable with and skilled in the use of constantly evolving information technologies. The rationale for this educational need is the understanding that hospitals and other healthcare facilities have increasingly adopted sophisticated new health information systems, and that failure to properly train personnel in their use would lead to critical implementation failures. It is thus that the overarching learning outcome of this lesson plan is comfort and competence in the use of critical and evolving Health Information Systems.

Learning Objectives and Bastable's Three Domains

Bastable's text on nursing education orients course content toward three essential domains through which to shape learning objectives. Each domain encompasses skill sets to be developed through these objectives.

Bastable identifies the Cognitive Domain as the individual and collective matrices by which students employ their knowledge and intuition to make use of information received in a learning context. Among the skills contained in this category are comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. With regard to prospective learning objectives, this means that course content and curricular approach must be concordant with the active processes by which students gather, use, and integrate information. A particular objective of the course will be to require students to employ skills within this domain as a means of overcoming a lack of practical context.

Bastable's second skill set is the Affective Domain, within which students compose themselves as part of a formal educational context. The skills considered here demonstrate the most basic building blocks for making useful sense of information gained from scholarly and direct experience. Included here are the actions of receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing — all relating to the way learners enact and refine automated approaches to education. A primary learning objective will therefore be to help students sharpen these instinctual aspects of information gathering, facilitating the transition of information into knowledge.

The third area Bastable addresses is the Psychomotor Domain. It is here that learners are typically most differentiated from one another, with a diverse range of aptitudes naturally represented. Skills such as perception, guided response, complex overt response, adaptation, and origination will inevitably constitute a broad spectrum of abilities, to which the lesson plan must be responsive. Learning objectives informed by this domain require that content be perceptible to class members across various levels of ability (Bastable, pp. 319–354).