Implementation of Technology to Enhance Nursing Practice Peer Review Processes

Nursing Peer Review is a foundational and essential element of professional nursing practice. It is a systematic methodology to improve nurse and patient outcomes. The process can be labor-intensive and cumbersome in managing data from diverse data sources, especially if the process is manual. Directors of Professional Practice in a health care system partnered with an external vendor to create an interactive software platform where technology was leveraged to streamline the review process including review of aggregate data and trend analyses and generate reports using an electronic database. This resulted in a 75% reduction in the number of steps and subsequently the time required to complete the review process from initial screening to referral and closure. The generation of actionable data facilitated active engagement of clinical nurses in addressing identified clinical issues using process improvement and evidence-based practice methods. A critical feature of the software platform is that it provides actionable data that can be used to improve patient safety and fosters accountability for clinical nurses to promote self-regulation of nursing practice.