NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 4 Course Development and Influencing Factors

Student name
FPX 6108

Capella University

Professor Name

Submission Date

Course Development and Influencing Factors

Developing a nursing education program that produces a confident and competent health care provider is a commonly implemented approach. Designing a curriculum that equips nursing learners with the requisite knowledge and skills necessary to advance to the next level in meeting the demands of the contemporary healthcare systems is also essential. The nursing curriculum has to be aligned with the demands of the profession (American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Essentials), the emerging needs of healthcare, and the evolving technologies (Lewis et al., 2022). The University of Pittsburgh’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program documented in this paper is constructed with a Competency-Based Education (CBE) framework inspired and modeled after the AACN Essentials. This paper explores this alternative orientation of the curriculum and considers the internal and external motivators of curriculum design, including collaboration, the institutional mission, and stakeholder engagement.

Course for Curriculum

This proposed course, Advanced Nursing Informatics and Digital Health, may be included in the University of Pittsburgh BSN Program. We plan to include this course in the third or fourth-year courses, as we feel the students would be interested and benefit greatly from a course that is beyond the basic and traditional nursing courses. This course would make students more clinical and more engaged, and is to be considered a core course with the option of three or four credit hours. The course would be a blended course built upon the presentation, simulation, and practice of electronic health record (EHR) systems. The focus of the course would be one of the two AACN Essentials (2021), that being either informatics and technologies in healthcare or the quality and safety domain (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021). The course may also be developed under the competency-based learning framework that exists in the Pitt BSN program, as the Pitt BSN program does have defined and measurable competencies.

Rationale for Adding Course

Increased technology integration for delivery of health care requires advanced informatics courses. Difficulty today in nursing practice demands knowledge of online technologies, the details of the patients, and the technologies to support clinical decision-making (Hants et al, 2023). Although the current curriculum, to some extent, has been gradually and consistently introducing an increasing number of learners to the world of informatics, this gap has not been filled. Hence, the program has been placed to fill this gap and to train the learners. This is an area that the course will not have left any footprints since the students will be ready to utilize EHRs, data analytics, and other digital health analytics in the most optimal way possible. It will also empower the students to be equipped with the skills that will see them deliver quality, safe, and evidence-based care. With this information at hand, the informatics nurses would then be best placed to be involved in the delivery of desirable patient outcomes and error reduction, as has been illustrated in the paper. Secondly, the course will meet the workforce expectations and requirements of the NCLEX, which would ensure the graduates would be well prepared to work in a real clinical environment.

External Factor Impact on Curriculum Design

The other overriding influences or stressors affecting the design of nursing programs are the factors that influence the changing nature of the nursing curriculum. The rapid development of health care technologies, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and artificial intelligence, may represent one of the factors influencing these changes (Amjad et al., 2023). These innovations alter the nurse-client care relationship and require nurses to acquire basic skills to function in the digital health and health care informatics domain. Consequently, the nursing programs and curricula employed will need to be changed. This will ensure that nursing students are aware of the health care technologies available to them. Additionally, the need to address the challenges of population health management and health care data analytics is another justification for including health care informatics in nursing programs. This need provides strong support for the inclusion of health care informatics in the nursing curricula.

While developing a curriculum, both the regulatory and the accrediting bodies make sure that these elements are part of the curriculum. Nursing curricula also have to reflect the requirements of various nursing organizations, such as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) (Welch and Smith, 2022). Two of the AACN Essentials (2021) compel CCNE to advocate for the restructuring of nursing programs. These Essentials focus on quality improvement and data-informed care (the latter is somewhat implicit). Given the current labor market challenges, hospitals will have few options but to recruit nurses with a strong focus on technology and data. The outside influences are the only things that explain the need for the nursing curricula to incorporate elements of the profession that are contemporary, relevant, and flexible to the needs of the nursing profession.

Internal Collaboration Framework for Successful Curriculum Design

Curriculum design requires developing constructive, in-house consultation with key stakeholders inside the institution (Kumar & Rewari, 2022). Faculty members play an essential role in the development of course materials, alignment of course learning outcomes, and harmonization of the curriculum with the standards of academic and professional accreditation. Curriculum committees and the faculty members who serve on them will carry out curriculum-related tasks including curriculum revision and curriculum approval, which will infuse all of the institution’s programs with the institutional goals and accreditation standards. It is hard to replace the simulation lab coordinators. Learning activities that were successfully implemented in the simulation lab are transferred to the environment where learning of clinical and technical skills is practiced.

The leaders of stakeholder groups will also be at the top of the stakeholder groups’ command chain. This will determine the preliminary overall focus of their proposed changes to the curriculum. The directors of the programs within the group (e.g., Heads of Deans) will ensure alignment of the proposed changes to the curriculum with the institution’s mission and goals. The intentional integration of staff activities (e.g., regular meetings) is beneficial to the development of a quality and coherent curriculum. Additionally, the data-informed decision-making construct permeates respect for the curriculum. They use student performance, course evaluations, and NCLEX pass rates to determine areas and the extent to which further enhancement of the curriculum should be done.

The Digital Health course will deal with some of the most challenging questions related to current nursing practices and the Advanced Nursing Informatics course. These students have charted their course in clinical decision support systems, electronic health records, and health informatics. These students will be introduced to data analytics and the ways in which data can be presented to help inform nursing practice and improve patient outcomes. The rest will include remote continuous patient monitoring and the application of AI in the treatment process and as a component of telehealth. Privacy and confidentiality concerns, including the HIPAA privacy regulations, will be part of the course. At the end of the course, students will have participated in simulation-based training and be able to apply the concepts of informatics to real clinical situations. This will help the students to learn both the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of the discipline.

Topical Outline for Course

The addition of co-existing courses to the BSN current curriculum would include courses that relate to the current curriculum. There is a chance to include the co-existing courses within NURS 4040: Evidence-Based Practice and Research. It would be allowable to access the information, borrow it, and analyze it to give an example of a practice. NURS 4030: Nursing Leadership and Management is also featured, as students will learn to interpret and analyze the information to develop their own leadership style and impact the organization. The knowledge that students acquire regarding theories and practices will be utilized during the analysis of the patient information and Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. The prior knowledge strand will be shifted and raised in the clinic practice. The new course will produce enhanced effectiveness and compatibility with the existing curriculum, as the other courses will connect to this course.

Topics Link to Other Courses

Every institution has a certain mission, thought pattern, and philosophy that will have a significant impact on how its curriculum is designed. Given that the U. of Pittsburgh School of Nursing pioneered the development of patient-centered care, it has integrated this focus into its courses. The course will fulfill this mission, as it will provide an informatics course, thus enabling students to use the technology to focus on improving patient care outcomes. Team Members Analytics: The philosophy of evidence-based practice of this program has been supported through the use of data analytics and electronic devices. To ensure their students practice the competencies of the AACN Essentials (2021) model (Vortman et al., 2024), Cultural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have been integrated, as students will now be working with new populations and will be able to manipulate both sides of the data to help reduce health inequities. Using their approaches, we are able to define and map the institutional and professional standards and the type of structure of a curriculum.

Institutional Mission, Philosophy, and Framework’s Impact on Curriculum Design

Both external and internal stakeholders will collaborate to prepare an effective curriculum. Internal stakeholders involved will include Academic Leaders, Curriculum Committee members, and Course Developers. External stakeholders will include clinical partners, as they will train stakeholders to be employable. Bringing in technology experts to integrate informatics systems in curriculum development may be one of the activities. Accrediting agencies (CCNE) are evident in the development of a good curriculum (DelMonte et al., 2022). Employers, along with healthcare organizations, will have a stake as they will provide feedback on whether graduates are prepared to practice in the profession. The collaboration can be in the form of advisory committees, partnerships, and ongoing feedback to ensure that the curriculum is relevant and effective.

Types of Collaboration Needed by Internal and External Stakeholders

The external stakeholders, along with the internal stakeholders, will be involved in curriculum development to come up with an effective curriculum. These internal stakeholders will include those who will be academic leaders, the Curriculum committees, and those developing the course and making it come true. The clinical partners will be the external stakeholders since the former will be able to train them in a way that would make them staffable. A bring-in of the technology professionals to set up coursework in which the informatics systems can be applied might also be an activity. A good curriculum (DelMonte et al., 2022) can be ensured by the accrediting agencies (CCNE). The employers and the healthcare organizations would have a few observations as they too would help provide feedback, claiming whether or not the graduates are ready for real-life situations of practicing. This collaboration can be achieved via the advisory committee, partnering, and constant feedback to make sure that the curriculum is sensitive and effective.

Consequences for not collaborating

Lack of participation in the curriculum development process can result in many negative outcomes. Stakeholders’ input helps the curriculum remain current. Without contribution, curriculum development may lead to the poor preparation of graduates who cannot gain employment, as they are not adequately trained to meet the expectations of future employers. Such graduates are not prepared to participate meaningfully in the practice of professional nursing. This lack of compliance with the professional nursing standards negatively impacts the quality of nursing education and professional practice, and it may have an adverse effect on NCLEX pass rates (Sheikoleslami et al., 2025). Further, the lack of employer-focused curriculum will lead to the poor preparation of graduates, who will fail to gain employment. It may also lead to the reversal of some nursing practice activities, and it will negatively impact the nursing practice activities. It will also negatively impact the future potential of the nursing program to become accredited, as the program will not have sufficient resources to meet the requirements of accreditation and the demands of nursing education. The success of the program depends on collaboration.

Conclusion

The most difficult aspect is the construction of a well-planned, supplemented, and flexible nursing education curriculum. Among the various changes underway, the most remarkable should be the innovation of the next step, nursing informatics and digital health, as the current nursing education, as the current BSN nursing education is a practically empty vessel regarding technology, and BSN field practice desperately needs an innovative influx. The technological aspect of the workforce and the external demands of changing technology include internal collaboration and the value of the institution, and are relevant to the determination of the curriculum design.