Assignment: Literature Review: The Use of Clinical Systems to Improve Outcomes and Efficiencies

Assignment: Literature Review: The Use of Clinical Systems to Improve Outcomes and Efficiencies

New technology—and the application of existing technology—only appears in healthcare settings after careful and significant research. The stakes are high, and new clinical systems need to offer evidence of positive impact on outcomes or efficiencies.

Nurse informaticists and healthcare leaders formulate clinical system strategies. As these strategies are often based on technology trends, informaticists and others have then benefited from consulting existing research to inform their thinking.

In this Assignment, you will review existing research focused on the application of clinical systems. After reviewing, you will summarize your findings.

To Prepare:

Review the Resources and reflect on the impact of clinical systems on outcomes and efficiencies within the context of nursing practice and healthcare delivery.

Conduct a search for recent (within the last 5 years) research focused on the application of clinical systems. The research should provide evidence to support the use of one type of clinical system to improve outcomes and/or efficiencies, such as “the use of personal health records or portals to support patients newly diagnosed with diabetes.”

Identify and select 4 peer-reviewed research articles from your research.

For information about annotated bibliographies, visit https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/assignments/annotatedbibliographies

The Assignment: (4-5 pages not including the title and reference page)

In a 4- to 5-page paper, synthesize the peer-reviewed research you reviewed. Format your Assignment as an Annotated Bibliography. Be sure to address the following:

Identify the 4 peer-reviewed research articles you reviewed, citing each in APA format.

Include an introduction explaining the purpose of the paper.

Summarize each study, explaining the improvement to outcomes, efficiencies, and lessons learned from the application of the clinical system each peer-reviewed article described. Be specific and provide examples.

In your conclusion, synthesize the findings from the 4 peer-reviewed research articles.

Use APA format and include a title page.

Use the Safe Assign Drafts to check your match percentage before submitting your work. CORE SKILL: a literature review is an ARGUMENT ORGANIZED BY THEME, not a series of article summaries stapled together. This is the single most common failure in this assignment and it is fatal to the grade.
THE TEST: if your paper reads “Smith (2020) found X. Then Jones (2021) found Y. Then Lee (2022) found Z,” you have written an ANNOTATED LIST, not a review. A review reads: “Three studies converge on the finding that CDS reduces prescribing error (Smith, 2020; Jones, 2021; Lee, 2022), though they diverge sharply on whether the effect persists past 12 months — a discrepancy that appears attributable to differences in alert-tuning rather than to the underlying intervention.” SYNTHESIS ACROSS SOURCES IS THE PRODUCT. Organize by THEME, and let the citations serve the theme.
SELECTING THE ARTICLES: peer-reviewed, recent (most rubrics specify within 5 years), and on the impact of a specific CLINICAL SYSTEM on outcomes and/or efficiencies. Search CINAHL, MEDLINE/PubMed, Cochrane. Document the search strategy.
SYSTEMS WORTH REVIEWING (pick ones with a real evidence base): CPOE with clinical decision support; BCMA; electronic sepsis prediction/early-warning systems; telehealth and remote patient monitoring; nurse-facing clinical dashboards; e-prescribing; patient portals; AI-assisted triage or documentation.
FOR EACH ARTICLE, EXTRACT: the system studied, the setting and population, the design and sample size, the OUTCOME measured, the RESULT (with the effect size, not just “significant”), and the LIMITATIONS.
THE ANALYSIS THE TOP BAND REQUIRES — do not simply report that the technology helped:
— OUTCOMES vs. EFFICIENCIES are different things and should be discussed separately. Outcomes = patient harm, mortality, infection, readmission. Efficiencies = time, cost, throughput, documentation burden. A system can improve one while WORSENING the other, and that trade-off is the most interesting thing you can say.
— THE EVIDENCE IS HETEROGENEOUS AND OFTEN WEAKER THAN VENDORS CLAIM. Many studies are single-site, pre/post, without controls, and conducted by teams with a stake in the result. Note publication bias — failed implementations are under-reported. A review that acknowledges this is far more credible than one that reports uniform success.
— NAME THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: alert fatigue and override rates above 90%; workarounds that defeat the safety mechanism; automation bias; e-iatrogenesis (new error types created by the system — juxtaposition errors from adjacent dropdown entries, copy-forward propagating stale information); documentation burden and its link to clinician burnout; and the widening of disparities when telehealth requires broadband and device literacy that some patients lack.
CONCLUDE WITH: what the evidence supports, what it does not yet support, what the gaps are, and what this means for YOUR practice or organization — that final applied paragraph is frequently where the remaining marks sit.