14: LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY ■ 337to communicate with a research team, providing a mechanism to pose a question and get
immediate responses. Twitter is a relative newcomer to the social networking arena, debut-
ing in 2006, but has had a major impact on disseminating health information (Dreher, 2009b).
Thirty- one percent of health professionals and 26% of U.S. hospitals are using social media,
like Twitter to communicate with patients, sharing news and networking with colleagues
(MacDonald, 2014). Notable examples include a surgeon sending “tweets” from an operat-
ing room when a particularly innovative surgical procedure was underway at Henry Ford
Hospital in Detroit, Michigan (Cohen , 2009), and when researchers demonstrated to effi-
cacy of using tweets to monitor disease outbreak (Nagel et al., 2013). There are many prom-
inent and reputable “Tweeters” such as the Centers for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins
University, Mayo Clinic, and World Health Organization. The Healthcare Hashtag Project
provides an opportunity for health care professions to connect by serving as a community
that makes it easy for health care professionals to join Twitter conversations on specific areas
of interest, within a specialty or disease or just find out what health care topics are trending
in real- time ( http://www.symplur.com ). Products like Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com) can help
you manage multiple social media feeds and have the capability to analyze the big data that
are available in social media to identify trends. Hootsuite can also be used to monitor what
is being said about your organization in social media and allow more timely intervention
should negative or inaccurate information be circulating via social media.
Personal learning spaces, such as NetVibes and Scrapplet, are gaining in popular-
ity as a means to individualize one’s web experience by creating a single, personalized
page that has the capability to function as an aggregator collecting and organizing RSS
feeds and other information from multiple sources. Information collected from news
sources such as blogs, social networks, or podcasts will be organized and presented in
a uniquely customized manner and automatically updated. One particularly valuable
feature is the capability to set up a “watch” dashboard to keep track of subjects of inter-
est. One of the strengths of a personal learning environment (PLE) is that it allows the
individual to manage their formal and informal learning needs (Dabbagh & Kitsantas,
2012). A personalized learning environment permits the user to access “mash- up” infor-
mation. The capability of combining and remixing information, media, content, and
web applications and services opens up the opportunity to perceive information in new
ways by enhancing lifelong learning through a highly personalized experience.
The clinical information resource DynaMed contains an easy- to- use alert service
that can be established in the product’s “Recent Updates” menu. Users are able to select
a general area of interest from this screen, along with having the ability to select an
additional filter “Practice Changing Updates Only” that will deliver notifications to
a preferred e- mail address on a daily basis. In a cohort study of updating speeds of
commonly used clinical information summary resources, DynaMed was found to offer
the quickest updates based on citation analysis (Banzi et al., 2011).
Clearly, there is a tremendous value to be found in these tools. The strategies and
tools described in this section offer the doctorally prepared nurses not only a way to
stay up to date and support lifelong learning activities essential in a dynamic health care
arena, but also a way to make it both highly personalized and relevant.
■ TECHNOLOGY FOR LEADERSHIP ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
OF THE DOCTORAL APN
The doctoral APN’s academic preparation as a clinical expert and leader with an intimate
understanding of health care practitioner information needs places him or her in a position
to play an important role in influencing the health care system. Important competencies to