Robert Douglas John Fraser*, Rob D. Fraser & Associates Inc., Toronto, Canada Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: C-Rotunda Room Date: 2012-09-16 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM Last modified: 2012-09-12

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Nurses provide direct patient care across the lifespan, in acute and community settings, providing health interventions, education and promotion. As one of the few providers with such a breadth of involvement in the patient experience and across the healthcare spectrum they have tremendous insight into the patient challenges, and system issues. Unfortunately, due to a lack of visible support of innovation and platforms for sharing ideas, nurses do not always have an ability to implement change projects, and if they do it can be difficult for them to share.

The Connecting Nurse’s initiative is an international partnership between industry, professional nursing associations, and clinicians to look at how these challenges might be addressed using online tools for sharing and supporting innovation. A wide variety of methods and case studies were evaluated for potential models. A steering committee with global representation of nurses made a decision to develop and test two online platforms, Connecting Nurse’s and Information Shareapy.

Care Challenge is an online platform recognizing, rewarding, and promoting nursing innovation. Learning from case studies a platform was built to leverage the power of communities to self-identify problems and potential solutions. Nurses from around the globe could complete a short form that would then be reviewed before becoming public. Information on the problem, solution, and expected results was collected, and rich media (photo, video) could also be included. After a short review process the project was made public on the website where any visitor could read, vote (support), or share the project through social networks. On April 30th, 2012 twenty prizes will be awarded to this year’s top projects – as decided by an international panel of nurses based on pre-defined criteria. To date 70 projects from 18 countries have been submitted, which have been voted on over 17,000 times. Ten prizes are a small grants project costs, and ten prizes offer professional video production to highlight the completed project. The prizes were intended to help nurses accomplish their work, or help spread the innovation to other areas of practice, research or education.

The second platform Information-Shareapy is a platform to help nurses share quality information and resources on a variety of health topics. The intent is to reduce the time individuals nurses need to spend gathering resources, which will hopefully allow them to improve their practice and provide patients with better information. The network validates nurses and allows them to create a social profile, provide feedback on other’s resources and develop communities of practice. The pilot will launch in March 2012 and included 200 nurses from across the globe. User data and feedback will be collected and to further develop and improve the platform.

This presentation’s objective is to discuss the challenge of starting and sharing innovation in healthcare and sharing lessons learned from the Connecting Nurse’s Initiative. Further data collection and evaluation would be included, providing insight into website analytics, usage patterns and the efficacy of on- and off-line engagements strategies.