The general themes of these articles centered around diabetes and medical care as affiliated with IT. All were also Australian-based. The use of IT was contrasted with traditional interventions (such as POC) that were not affiliated with IT. Most of the articles dealt with IT as associated with diabetes and assessed whether IT did indeed show results. Two of the articles dealt with IT in a general theme. The general theme was that IT certainly does not show incorrect results and that its introduction in the medical field can only help rather than hinder the nursing profession. At the very least, results of IT interventions replicate those of traditional interventions. Often times, they improve on them as well as making work easier for nurses and health practitioners. The challenge that exists then is for researchers and practitioners to find ways of introducing IT into the medical field in a way that helps nurses and others overcome intimidation and other hindrances towards IT and facilitates its use and expansion in the nursing/ medical health environment.
¶ … veracity and efficacy of traditional (non IT) methods of treatment in connection with diabetes. One of the most common treatments assessed was point-of-care (POCT) of blood glucose at diagnostic levels for diabetes.
Some of the researchers recommended replacement of IT instruments for better assessing diabetes level of glucose.
Although Martin et al. (2005) found POC to be efficacious ("as it is a community-friendly, practical, and accurate method for monitoring diabetes "), Rush et al. (2008) demonstrated that the true blood glucose was underestimated by POC, and that POC is therefore not recommended . Their implied recommendation, in other words, were to use the more reliable methods of technological assistance in order to more accurately and reliably guage diabetes glucose level.
Whether POC by itself is / is not reliable is still debatable but Marley et al. (2007) discovered close association between comparison of the glucose level measurements taken at a reference laboratory and taken by POC capillary. The IT results in other words resulted in high reliability and concordance of results.
Another article (Hu et a. 2010) found that simultaneous testing of HbA1c and FPG (HbA1C and/or FPG) for those who had diabetes at an early age, was better and more reliable than individual testing of either, and that this could be better done by technology than by menial aims.
Over and again, authors' tests of traditional diabetes interventions showed that the same could be as effectively -- if not more -- be accomplished by IT methods. It is no surprise therefore that the Health Informatics Society of Australia's Health Informatics Education Report manufactured various recommendations, one of which was a training program for nurses that would focus on IT skills through standardization of qualification (Soar et al., 2003).
This need was emphasized by Yu (2005) who showed that most nurses would welcome IT training as well as the need for it in the nursing environment. There are certain negative points for IT introduction. The top ones among them were inadequate skills, lack of IT support, and access to computers, while the most minor issue was privacy concerns (Yu, 2005).
The aim of these researchers, in short, was to test traditional treatments (mainly for diabetes) against its results. Many of the researchers concluded that IT provides as results that are just as efficacious and correct if not more so, and they emphasized the need for promoting expanded IT programs and training in nursing / medical health carnivores.
Findings all agree that IT can help the medical field. In terms of diabetes, many of the researchers agreed that IT results were more accurate than traditional results; two however disagreed with this statement, with one saying that similar results were found in both. Most of the articles were related to diabetes; two however were related to the medical field in general showing the need for IT to be indiscriminately introduced across the field. IT is the common denominator in all these articles . The general themes centered around diabetes and medical care as affiliated with IT. All were also Australian-based. The use of IT was contrasted with traditional interventions (such as POC) that were not affiliated with IT. Most of the articles dealt with IT as associated with diabetes and assessed whether IT did indeed show results. Two of the articles dealt with IT in a general theme.
The general theme was that IT certainly does not show incorrect results and that its introduction in the medical field can only help rather than hinder the nursing profession. At the very least, results of IT interventions replicate those of traditional interventions. Often times, they improve on them as well as making work easier for nurses and health practitioners.
A secondary theme, therefore, for some of the articles was encouragement in introducing IT into the medical health care profession.
Limitations that are noted in the studies include the following:
Many of them deal with specific populations and results from one cannot be arbitrarily applied to others. The populations were most times from one single institution at one single time. This was the case with Hu et al. (2008) and with Marley et al. (2007).
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