May 2024

Promotions

Diane Berish, Barbara Birriel, and Sharilee Hrabovsky - Associate Research Professors.

Congratulations!

ENRS Highlights

Congratulations to all for a successful event!

ENRS Posters

Penn State 2024 Graduate Exhibition

Health and Life Sciences

Third Place Winner

Sherif Olanrewaju, Nese College of Nursing “Invisible Minority: The Experiences of Migrant Nurses Caring for Older Adults in U.S Long-Term Care Facilities. A Preliminary Finding”

Graduate School News

Achievement Announcements

Vaccination rates among rural populations are typically lower when compared to urban communities. Many factors, including income, insurance status, convenience, perceived risk, and trust play a role in vaccine uptake. Farmers and farm workers face additional occupation-related barriers to obtaining vaccines compared to other groups living in rural areas. Research shows that strategies to address these challenges and improve vaccination rates should integrate interdisciplinary teams, community stakeholders, and multiple evidenced-based approaches. The goal of this study is to translate current evidence to improve immunization rates among farmers and farm workers, an at-risk and underserved group in Centre County, Pennsylvania. Using a multi-modal approach, we aim to: a) establish the Centre County Immunization Coalition, the research and operations infrastructure for a mobile vaccination program; b) conduct a needs assessment to assess, measure, and describe enablers and barriers to vaccine uptake among farmers and farm workers in Centre County, Pennsylvania; and c) develop and pilot test a vaccine recruitment initiative using findings from the needs assessment and current literature. Results from the pilot test will be used to revise and refine the vaccine recruitment initiative for broader dissemination. Study findings have the potential to expand our knowledge of rural vaccine uptake and inform care delivery models for tailored interventions for rural underserved populations.

Publications

Paths Forward for Clinicians Amidst the Rise of Unregulated Clinical Decision Support Software: Our Perspective on NarxCare

Michele J. Buonora, MD, MS, MHS, Sydney A. Axson, PhD, MPH, MHS, Shawn M. Cohen, MD, and William C. Becker, MD

ABSTRACT Amidst the US overdose epidemic, policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and healthcare institutions have contributed to a decrease in opioid prescribing, assuming reduced mortality would result—an assumption we now understand was oversimplifed. At this intersection between public health and public safety domains as they relate to opioid prescribing, unregulated and proprietary clinical decision support tools have emerged without rigorous external validation or public data sharing. In the following piece, we discuss challenges facing clinicians practicing medicine amidst unregulated clinical decision support tools, using the case of Bamboo Health’s NarxCare—a prescription drug monitoring program–based analytics platform marketed as a clinical decision support tool—that is already positioned to impact over 1 billion patient encounters annually. We argue that sufcient evidence does not yet exist to support NarxCare’s wide implementation, and that clinical decision support tools like NarxCare have fourished in recent years due to a lack of federal regulatory oversight and shielding by their proprietary formulas, which have facilitated their unchecked and outsized infuence on patient care. Finally, we suggest specifc actions by federal regulatory agencies, healthcare institutions, individual clinicians, and researchers, as well as academic journals, to mitigate potential harms associated with unregulated clinical decision support tools.

Article

7th Annual Translating Research to Innovations in Practice Symposium

Keynote Speaker

Susan J. Loeb, PhD, RN, FGSA, FAAN, Professor of Nursing and Ph.D. Program Director, Penn State Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing

Dr. Loeb is the scheduled keynote speaker. Her research focus is Enhancing Health in Correctional Settings.

CNO Panel

Join our panel of Chief Nursing Officers for their insight on the following topics:

Wendy Clayton, MSN, RN, CCM, CPHQ—Nursing Clinical Practice
Michele Szkolnicki, MS, BSN, RN, FACHE, CMPE—Nursing Informatics
Leslyn Williamson, DNP, MSN, RN, MPH, NEA-BC, FACHE—Nursing Education and Professional Development
Barbara Zuppa, MSN, RN—Nursing Professional Excellence

Poster and Podium Presentations

The symposium will offer a wide variety of information and research findings on such topics as:

Work Environment / Violence
MindStrong / Work-life Balance
Pediatrics
Supply Waste
Racial Disparities
Community Health
Substance Abuse / Women's Health
Critical Care / ICU
Long-Term Care
Artificial Intelligence / vICU

The poster presentations will be in-person, which will provide the time to celebrate nurses’ scholarly work and to engage in conversation about clinical practice and professional issues.

myResearch Portal

To help manage your external award finances, please look into the myResearch Portal . For those of you with internal funding, you may need to coordinate with the finance office in the college that has that funding account. Feel free to reach out to the CNR with additional questions you may have.

myResearch Portal

Resources

Center for Nursing Research Office provides an organized infrastructure designed to support graduate research faculty and their interdisciplinary teams throughout the various stages of their projects, from preparing proposals and obtaining funding to disseminating results in peer-reviewed journals and at national and international conferences. If you have any questions use the resource list below.

Contact the CNR

Research Faculty

Research Opportunities

Current Awards

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