Emerging Technology in Nursing Education

EMERGING TECHNOLOGY Executive Summary To maintain current in technology trends of healthcare, nursing programs must evaluate and consider changes in the curriculum to integrate new technologies. A recent technology introduced to the nursing education curriculum is the use of a virtual patient simulator, I-Human. This software developed by Kaplan is utilized in higher education to provide students an interactive interface to assess, diagnosis, and treat patients virtually. It provides a practice environment for clinical skills, and critical thinking, and a debriefing post-conference. Currently, the institutions nursing program only provides clinical skills training on-site at the hospital or nursing home environment. Students arrive to site with their clinical group and instructors. They are assigned a patient to care for throughout their shift and provide nursing care in respect to their clinical goals for the day. If the patient is too sick to interact, away for testing, or disinterested in having a student, the undergraduate may have a poor clinical experience. This leads to an inability to develop skills necessary to provide safe, confident patient care. The current nursing program does not have a substitute for this clinical interaction that can provide practice of skills and critical thinking. The nurse educator is a leader of change in the institution to introduce and develop change for educational technology in the 21st century. Challenges found in nursing education are the institutional program’s inability to adopt and expand their technologies to keep up with the expanding scope of practice. Quality of education directly affects safety of patient care. Nursing curriculum must be revised to reflect technology advancements to ensure graduates are prepared for success. Video conferencing and virtual simulation are two modern technologies that can improve nursing education when integrated into the institution’s curriculum. Both technologies increase 2 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY interaction between learners, instructors, and materials to aid learning. Using Lewin’s model of change, a virtual patient simulator, I-Human will be introduced into the curriculum for “The Role of the BSN in Promoting Community Health”. A thorough literature review on the two technologies will develop a need gap analysis. This need will be presented to stakeholders and evaluated for challenges. A force field analysis will identify the external and internal factors with implementation and propose solutions. A plan for implementation will be developed and an analysis of organizational readiness. The purpose of this proposed technology change is to improve the institution’s nursing program by maintaining modern curriculum and ensuring students have the skills to succeed. This change will improve student learning, critical thinking, and their ability to perform clinical skills. It will prepare them for real-life nursing and provide the confidence needed for successful careers.