The development of an online clinical log for advanced practice nursing students: a case study

Three years ago at the Medinfo conference a prototype version of a clinical log for nursing students at Vanderbilt University was demonstrated. The purpose of the log is to document the types of clinical experiences the students are participating in as part of their academic program. We collected log data during that first year and received ongoing formative feedback from both students and faculty regarding its current feature set and desirable features for future implementations. Most of the requested new features have now been implemented. This paper describes some of the latest features of the clinical log, the advantages and disadvantages of ongoing development versus acquiring commercial products, and the procedures and results we have put in place to gather from faculty and students the features they want to see in the log. This paper also documents some of the data from early data mining.