Usefulness of a Personal Digital Assistant-based Advanced Practice Nursing Student Clinical Log: Faculty Stakeholder Exemplars.

The number of health sciences educational programs that are integrating personal digital assistants (PDAs) into their curricula is on the rise. In this paper, we report an evaluation of the usefulness of a PDA-based advanced practice nursing (APN) student clinical log through faculty stakeholder exemplars in three areas: pediatric asthma care; procedures of Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (NP) students; and diagnostic and screening procedures of Women's Health NP students. We generated descriptive data through routine queries and through custom SQL queries at the request of a specific faculty member who wished to examine a particular aspect of an educational program. In addition, we discussed the potential implications of the data with the respective faculty members. The exemplars provide evidence that faculty stakeholders found the APN student clinical log to be useful for a variety of purposes including monitoring of student performance, benchmarking, and quality of care assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]