<p>Nurse educator perspectives about knowledge, awareness, skills, and attitudes regarding documentation, as a component of health information technology can offer important data on the links between achieving safe and quality patient outcomes. A classic grounded theory approach was used to explore nurse educator faculty perceptions of issues and strategies related to teaching effective patient care documentation. The current problem with teaching nursing documentation among nurse educators surfaced during the interviews with nurse educators and the specific problem was identified in the study from the views of study participants. This study included two main purposes: (a) to explicate the issues and strategies of nurse educators teaching of nursing documentation while transitioning from paper-based to an electronic health record format, and (b) to generate an explanatory theory of teaching nursing documentation and its negative or positive influences of student learning of the competency. In-depth interviews with observation were conducted among sixteen nurse educators from a baccalaureate nursing program. A grounded theory of internalizing accountability emerged as the core variable/core category through classic grounded theory data collection and analysis in a simultaneous fashion. Four sub-categories and components also emerged and include (a) progressing levels, (b) reflecting on conflicting roles of nurse educators, (c) accepting transitioning, and (d) engaging and empowering through leadership. As a result of the analysis of the study findings, conclusions in this study filled the current gap in the literature through development of a new theory of internalizing accountability with future use in undergraduate and graduate nursing education. </p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of email communication between providers and patients. The research also tests for the frequency of email usage in different provider settings. The following study performs a secondary data analysis on the Electronic Medical Records data retrieved from the (2009) National Ambulatory Medical Survey (NAMCS) to test for the following five hypotheses: (a) Use of email consults with patients will decrease in-patient visits, (b) Use of email consults will decrease telephone consults, (c) Hospital systems use higher email consults compared to that in solo practices and group practices, (d) Medical practices with an implemented electronic medical records system use higher email consults, and (e) Practices with greater private insurance reimbursements use higher email consults. A chi-squared analysis is performed to test for the association between the use of email consultations and its effects on other factors. The results showed that there is a reasonable association between use of email consults and hospital visits, email consults and telephone consults, email consults and implementation of electronic medical records (EMR), and email consults and the type of payers. On the contrary, there was no significant association between email consults and the type of medical practice. Although electronic communication can improve efficiency, accessibility and quality of healthcare, not every medical practice has integrated it into their care delivery.</p>