Computer Technology and the Nutrition Support Professional: Make It Work For You!

Abstract

Healthcare professionals caring for patients receiving enteral and parenteral nutrition (PN) are faced with the need to develop and expand their technologic skills. Patients and their caregivers are finding information from the Internet that healthcare professionals are then tasked with evaluating for accuracy and veracity. Healthcare professionals themselves must be able to rapidly find information to answer clinical questions that arise during daily practice. Information-seeking skills must be well developed in order to find information from the Internet, as well as in the professional literature. Such skills include the ability to formulate a search strategy that limits extraneous results as much as possible yet ensures that relevant results are not missed. In addition, electronic health records are being implemented in many facilities now, with a national goal of an electronic health record in place by 2014. Clinicians must be involved with implementation at all stages, including planning, purchasing, implementing, and evaluating an electronic system. Electronic health records can include very sophisticated components that provide for computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and decision support. Nutrition support must be an integral part of these systems. This paper provides some background information on the Internet and the World Wide Web, along with strategies to find information using search engines. Information is also provided on the use of MEDLINE to search medical literature. Finally, a brief overview of the electronic health record is provided, with suggestions for involvement by nutrition support clinicians in implementation of electronic health records in the workplace.