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After completing this education activity, the learner will be able to discuss why the appropriate use of mCDS needs to be included in undergraduate nursing curriculum and clinical nursing education, as well as clinical policies for quality care and patient safety.
Key Words: Undergraduate nursing students, mobile clinical decision support (mCDS), clinical knowledge, clinical skills, students' perception.
Effective clinical decision-making is imperative for patient safety and positive patient outcomes. Undergraduate nursing students enter practicum to build clinical decision-making skills. They come to face a variety of patient care needs in dynamic and complex healthcare systems. Students often lack the confidence to make clinical decisions and experience anxiety in caring for patients with complex diagnoses, numerous medications, and various abnormal laboratory results in the clinical setting (Brady et al., 2017; Smith & Rushton, 2018). Therefore, having clinical decision support (CDS) resources accessible on-demand in the clinical setting is important for nursing students to improve confidence and decision-making capabilities as well as ensure patient safety.
Studies have shown healthcare providers benefit from access to CDS resources, as reported in an integrative review by Lopez and colleagues (2017); physicians' and nurse practitioners' use of CDS resources has improved preventative services, clinical test orders, appropriateness of prescriptions, and financial outcomes. The review also indicated registered nurses' use of CDS resources enhanced decisionmaking, guideline adherence, medication management, and situation awareness (Lopez et al., 2017). While these CDS resources are easily accessible by healthcare providers on their work computers in clinical facilities, they are limited to nursing students.
Mobile Clinical Decision Support Resources for Nursing Students
There are CDS resources available in diverse forms, such as printed textbooks, pocketbooks, notes, or electronic resources students can utilize. In particular, a variety of mobile clinical decision support (mCDS) resources are available these days, including downloadable applications for offline use or subscriptions for online access. Examples include Nursing Central© (Beers & Berry, 2015; Doyle et al., 2016), Skyscape (CarterTempleton et al., 2018), Medscape/Medline (Doyle et al., 2016, Mann et al., 2015), Lippincott's Nursing Drug Guide (Mann et al., 2015), and Micromedex (Carter-Templeton et al., 2018). The price of available mCDS applications varies upon the choice of features or functions - some of which are free. Many different mCDS applications allow access to a...