Omaha System Innovations: Recognizing & Remedying a Void for Online Graduate Students

With the resurgence of continuing and life-long learning among the nursing workforce in their quest for advanced degrees utilizing diverse modalities of delivery, a glaring void in available health data has emerge. As a faculty member for population-focused care and preventative programming coursework, the students find that they are stone-walled in their search for local morbidity and mortality data and trends. On-line graduate students find that few local public health departments have adopted systems that support an electronic health information management system. Available data for a community specific focus generally is gathered using Bayesian methods and merged with a broader population perspective that addresses population data well beyond a single geographic community's borders. It is acknowledged that reasonable sample size is imperative for producing reliable data. However, the need to recognize and address local trends in morbidity incidence and prevalence is also imperative in maintaining a healthy community. Community-focused information systems supporting accepted nursing vocabularies, such as the Omaha System, do exist but are not utilized by cost-strapped local health departments. As educators, we must challenge our students and ourselves to address this shortfall in valuable health data in both our professional life and our civic life within our community. The students must be charged to explore information systems with community specific application as well as their local health departments as part of their community assessments. During this exploration; the students will inquire about the methods of data collection and management, be it electronic or paper-based, and how it relates to promoting and preserving wellness and health for all residents, including the underserved and the disadvantaged in their respective communities. This data from numerous graduate students in various areas of the country will be collected and incorporated into a presentation that recognizes this void and will offer strategies for remediation locally, regionally and nationally.