Reflections on NLN Technology Conferences: 10 Years and Counting.

Abstract

Nursing education has just marked an important milestone. The most recent NLN/Elsevier Technology Conference took place October 22-24 in Tampa, the 10th national conference focused on technology hosted by the National League for Nursing. As the saying goes, we've come a long way, baby! The opening session of this year's conference, presented by founding committee members Mary Anne Rizzolo, Diane Billings, Helen Connors, Pam Jeffries, and me, was a review of highlights dating from the first conference, held in 2004 in San Antonio. Since that time, conferences have taken place throughout the United States, with each site presenting unique opportunities to view the latest technologies. The initial purpose of the NLN Technology Conference was to help faculty tackle the growth of emerging technologies and harness their potential use in nursing education. The conference evolved, creating a platform for NLN Health Information Technology Scholars (HITS) to present their projects. HITS was a five-year grant to the University of Kansas funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration in 2007. The purpose was to develop, implement, evaluate, disseminate, and sustain a faculty development collaborative (FDC) initiative to integrate information and other technologies in nursing curricula. The NLN, the University of Kansas, and three university partners were involved: University of Colorado Denver, Indiana University, and Johns Hopkins University. All told, the grant provided training and mentoring for 265 scholars. More recently, Elsevier became a major supporter of the conference, which has more than doubled in size from nearly 100 participants in the early years to more than 200 today. Distinct groups of participants present each year. Many of the HIT scholars continue to attend and present their own technology projects. The theme for the 2015 conference, Partnering for Connected Health, was woven into the plenary sessions and the various breakout sessions and posters. The pre-sessions included one on DIY (Do-It-Yourself) BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategies for building a connected learning environment using students' smartphones. The other pre-session was on collaborating with instructional designers. Telehealth had a strong presence, with numerous presentations from faculty who use integration remote monitoring for clinical students, interprofessional education, and tasks such as diabetes management in rural areas. In her plenary address, Dr. Patricia Dykes, nurse scientist and program director for research in the Center for Nursing Excellence at Brigham & Women's Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, addressed the necessary competencies for nurses practicing in a connected health environment. She spoke about the use of consumer-facing tools, any tools that consumers use to connect to health care, such as wearable apps, to bring together inpatients and their families as part of the interdisciplinary care team. These tools help ensure concordance between the patient's goals and the goals set by the various providers on the health care team. During the second day's plenary session, we focused on integrating connected health into the nursing curriculum and asked participants to identify the take-away messages they would bring back to their organizations, as well as their next steps to start the integration. We like to describe the technology conferences as unconferences, opportunities for participants to determine the dialogue in four specific underlying areas: eLearning, simulation, informatics, and telehealth. This year there were two new additions to the conference: a conference app and a gallery walk. Both generated quite a buzz. Participants downloaded the interactive conference app for use throughout the conference and beyond. It allowed them to view the agenda, download slides, complete surveys, tweet, post pictures, send messages to other participants, and post messages about their experiences and ah ha moments. …