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Choosing Content You Can Trust

June 28, 2022
June 28, 2022

This blog is taken from a recent webinar moderated by HealthStream’s Caroline Acree, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Clinical Staff Development and featured Colleen Seeber-Combs, MSN, RN, Section Editor, Dynamic Health-EBSCO and HealthStream’s Angie Biesterfeld, Senior Solution Executive, Clinical Staff Development. The webinar focused on EBSCO’s Dynamic Health Comprehensive Nursing Solutions.

Reliable information that is available at a nurse’s fingertips has always been important, but the pandemic has created a more urgent need for a solution such as EBSCO’s Dynamic Health. While nurses flexing on and off nursing units is not new, it has happened much more frequently as a result of the pandemic. Nurses find themselves transitioning to new units to care for COVID patients as well as other services with which they may have been unfamiliar and now many of them are transitioning back to their units. As they make these transitions, they may feel somewhat less than confident with new and different types of patients. 


Enhancing Learning and Development With Point-of-Care Decision Making

Seeber-Combs began by describing the evolution of Dynamic Health. The 2021 “Future of Nursing Report” calls for nurses to work at the top of their licenses, education and expertise. However, every nurse has a different level of expertise and nursing programs do not graduate uniformly prepared nurses, so the program needs to be able to respond to a variety of educational needs. “Dynamic Health was designed to meet the needs of every nurse at every level which allows for seamless educational progression,” said Seeber-Combs.

EBSCO’s solution is a database and search engine that can deliver actionable clinical information and point-of-care decision making for nurses. She went on to describe that content is progressively disclosed with screens that open and close to reveal more or less content depending on the learner’s experience and preference, delivering just the right amount of the right information for the user.


Learning and Development That Improves Collaboration

Building a strong interdisciplinary team is important, but not always so easy to accomplish. Dynamic Health is organized by clinical skills, but also by diseases and conditions, signs and symptoms, care interventions and diagnostic tests which makes it easier to collaborate with other providers, such as physicians. “The depth and breadth of our content encourages inter-disciplinary collaboration and ultimately results in improvements to the efficiency of workforce planning” said Seeber-Combs. Workforce planning tools have also been included to help healthcare organizations provide a high-quality onboarding process as well as facilitating a culture of lifelong learning and opportunities to earn CEUs. 


Ensuring Your Staff Has Content That You (and They) Can Trust

In the past, when a new or transitioning nurse had questions, they typically would ask a nurse manager or the most senior nurse on the floor. In the wake of the pandemic, that may no longer be a feasible option. Nurses have transitioned on and off and back on to units leaving many nurses with doubts about which member of their team has the knowledge base to address their questions. In addition, Seeber-Combs pointed to the ongoing issue of large numbers of travel nurses which may further contribute to a nurse’s uncertainty about where to turn for help.

Biesterfeld pointed out that in the absence of being able to ask a well-respected colleague, some not-so-great alternatives have emerged. Nurses who are pressed for time and perhaps urgently in need of an answer may simply choose to use Google or YouTube for what they believe is the quickest and easiest answer to their question. “This can result in huge variations in practice,” pointed out Biesterfeld. It may also leave them and the healthcare organizations that they work for vulnerable to major risk as the accuracy of the content is questionable.

“Dynamic Health is strictly based on an evidence-based methodology which means that you can trust that your staff is acting on the information that matches current best practices,” said Seeber-Combs. She then went on to describe the rigorous process by which content is selected. EBSCO has certified medical librarians that are regularly researching and curating all available literature. The best of this literature is then presented to writers who will then evaluate its’ trustworthiness and relevance.


Content You Can Trust - Just In Time

EBSCO’s Dynamic Health can provide the right answers that your nursing staff is looking for, and it is as easy to access as far less reliable sources. Dynamic Health offers 24/7 access with remote logins from anywhere. This solution is cloud-based and mobile-enabled. While it is readily accessible to your nursing staff, the most important thing is that the content is content you can trust.

The program can be accessed through an app on a user’s phone, or it may also be accessed through the electronic health record and may also be placed on any desktop. In addition, the content includes videos, photographs and visual images to engage learners and to help improve learning and retention.