Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Nurses are a key component of the health care system and have the ability to provide innovative solutions to improve quality and safety for patients, while improving workplace conditions, and increasing recruitment and retention of nurses. Encouraging innovation behaviors among nurses is essential to improving health care. Innovation behaviors are defined as behavior from an employee toward developing new products, developing new markets, or improving business routines in their employing organization. The purpose of this descriptive study was to explore the relationships among individual and organizational characteristics and employee innovation behavior among nurses. The proposed model, The Framework for Study of Innovation Behaviors among Nurses, was developed based on the work by Kuratko, Hornsby, and Montagno and is specific to nursing innovation behaviors.

Overweight and obese children have increased risks for multiple preventable diseases and conditions which can impair their physiological health and significantly increases the overall cost of their healthcare. Free mobile applications and technology for weight loss, dietary tracking, and physical activity may be quite useful for monitoring nutritional intake and exercise to facilitate weight loss. If so, nurses are well positioned to recommend such tools as part of their efforts to prevent childhood obesity and help children and parents better manage childhood obesity when it is present. However, there are no guidelines that nurses can use to determine what applications or technologies are most beneficial to children and their parents. The purpose of this project is to develop such guidelines based on a review of the scientific literature published in the last 5 years. Articles regarding healthy-lifestyle promoting mobile applications and technological approaches to health and fitness interventions were identified by searching articles indexed by CINAHL, Psychinfo, Medline, ERIC, IEEE Xplore, and Academic Search Premier. Identified articles were assessed using Melnyk’s hierarchy of evidence and organized into tables so that implications for research and suggestions for practice could be made.