AC faculty introduce innovative technology

Two faculty members have been recognized for their efforts to usher Amarillo College into the modern medical age.

|Debby Hall, center at back, and several nursing students review materials before a nursing technology implementation lecture on the West Campus.|

Khristi McKelvy, a nursing instructor, and Debby Hall, an assistant professor of nursing, said they realized graduates of the nursing program will be stepping into information technology-dominated health care environments.The outmoded paper charts students in the program have been using for chronicling patient care simulations are seldom used in the field.

McKelvy and Hall received the Faculty Excellence Award last semester for their contribution to the advancement of technology use in education.

“Technology is fun. Learning something new, I like that,” McKelvy said.

The faculty duo created an innovative, Web-based, interactive health record for a standardized patient that simulates a true medical record and introduces students to the sort of technology being used in clinical practice today.

According to Hall, the project began in 2009. “We started it for fun,” she said. “We went through three versions before we settled on one.”

They were participants in Electronic Health Information Technology Systems (HITS), and their team received a grant from the National League of Nursing.

McKelvy and Hall shared their creation of an electronic health record with fellow nursing educators at the National League of Nursing Technology Conference in 2011 at Duke University.

“I learned a lot more about technology that year in health care,” Hall said.

McKelvy and Hall said they see this as just a beginning. Their goal is to have every student use a laptop that contains everything they need for classes and clinicals.

“The whole purpose was to get nurse educators to use more technology in clinicals,” Hall said.

McKelvy already has been using the EHR in combination with Skype to simulate Telehealth video conferences for home health care patients.

“Khristi is always very innovative,” said Marjeanne Moore, a nursing instructor.

McKelvy and Hall first tried to create an EHR using PowerPoint in 2009.

After finding it insufficient for their needs, they moved on to Publisher. The result was the version they presented at Duke.

It wasn’t until they finally settled on Adobe Dreamweaver that the EHR became the more complete version used today.

“We want to especially thank Brian Nixon,” Hall said. “He helped the most by showing us how to do things we wanted to do. He definitely didn’t do it for us.”