A computerized system for tracking practice and prescriptive patterns of family nurse practitioner students.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Primary Care Practice
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Decisions on aligning advanced practice nursing curricula with primary care practice require empirical data.
• Intuition-based assessments can lead to suboptimal educational outcomes and practice readiness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe a computerized database system for tracking nurse practitioner (NP) students' clinical practice.
• To address common data challenges in educational tracking.
• To provide practice data for NP students to prospective employers.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a combination of faculty-developed software (Family Nurse Practitioners Log - FNPLOG) and public domain software (Epi Info).
• Categorized variables into sociodemographic, diagnostic, and prescriptive components of primary care.
• Developed a system for computerizing, analyzing, and evaluating clinical experiences.

Main Results:

• The system offers a simple, efficient, and feasible method for managing student practice data.
• Successfully integrated practice tracking, data issue resolution, and employer reporting capabilities.
• Demonstrated the utility of data in evaluating student practice patterns.

Conclusions:

• The database system provides a data-driven foundation for advanced practice nursing education.
• Facilitates objective evaluation of NP students' clinical experiences and practice patterns.
• Offers potential for broader applications in nursing education and workforce development.