EBP: Health Digital Technology and Quality of Care

This assignment delves into evidence-based practice (EBP) and its application in healthcare, specifically examining the influence of health digital technology on the quality of care within a governmental hospital. The assignment begins by formulating a research question using the PICO framework, focusing on whether the implementation of health digital technology improves care quality. It then outlines the six steps of EBP, including defining search strategies with inclusion and exclusion criteria, critical appraisal of articles using tools like CASP, integrating research into practice, assessing outcomes, and disseminating findings. The assignment discusses the benefits of health digital technology, such as electronic health records and mHealth, in preventing medication errors, enhancing communication, and improving access to care, especially for socioeconomically disadvantaged patients. Search strategies using key terms and Boolean operators are described, along with the use of electronic databases like CINAHL, Medline, and PubMed. The assignment emphasizes the importance of critical appraisal using the CASP tool to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the research, making it a valuable resource for understanding EBP principles and the role of technology in healthcare.

Running head: EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
Research question: Can the implementation of Health digital technology improves the quality of
care in a governmental hospital?
A brief idea about the topic:
Improving the quality of care in the clinical setting is one of the main benefits of
integrating new technologies. In the clinical setting, medication errors, poor communication,
delayed treatment and lack of availability of clinical services are common instances that
intensified the need for health digital technology, especially in the government hospital (Cowie
et al. 2017). Health digital technology such as electronic health records or m health are
implementation improve quality of care by preventing breaching of confidentiality of the
patients, enhances the communication between providers and service users, avoid unplanned
hospitalizations and reduce medication errors (Heart, Ben-Assuli and Shabtai 2017). The health
digital technologies are specifically beneficial for the patients living in the socioeconomically
disadvantaged area who have difficulties in seeking health care services due to transportation
issues. It also improves monitoring the outcome of health care services.
PICO:
Population: hospital patients of the governmental hospital
Interventions: Health digital technology
Comparison: standard care without technology or N/A
Outcome: improved the quality of care
Six steps of evidence-based practice:
The six steps of evidence-based practice are used to make evidence-based decisions. The
first step is to formulate an answerable question (PICO) as observed above. The second step is to

2
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
ACCESS where a design of the search strategy through inclusion and exclusion criteria will be
done. In this case, inclusion criteria will be articles within 5 years, focused on Health digital
technology and in English. Any articles focused on other factors other than these factors will be
eliminated (Rousseau and Gunia 2016). The search strategy will be designed in this case to
obtain the research. The third step is to critically appraise the articles and in this case, various
articles will be assessed through critical appraisal tools such as JBI and CASP (Farzandipour et
al. 2019). The four steps will be integrating the research into the practice where it is effective or
not. The fifth step is to assess the outcome of the implementation into the practice and the last
step is to disseminate the outcome to the other disciplines.
The critical appraisal:
In this case, the critical appraisal will be done on the paper obtained from the databases
with the assistance of the CASP tool. It is the best suitable tool for assessing diverse research
critically and integrating it into the research. Based on the research design of the paper, 10
critical appraisal questions will be used which will provide the strength and weaknesses of the
research (Quigley et al. 2019).
Search:
Inclusion criteria will be designed for the research as discussed above. The key terms
will be “: Health digital technology”, ‘: Health digital technology AND improved quality of
care”. Bullean operators are used for broadening and narrowing down the research. These terms
will be provided to electronic databases such as CINAHL, Medline and PubMed.

3
EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE
Reference:
Cowie, M.R., Blomster, J.I., Curtis, L.H., Duclaux, S., Ford, I., Fritz, F., Goldman, S.,
Janmohamed, S., Kreuzer, J., Leenay, M. and Michel, A., 2017. Electronic health records to
facilitate clinical research. Clinical Research in Cardiology, 106(1), pp.1-9.
Farzandipour, M., Karami, M., Arbabi, M. and Abbasi Moghadam, S., 2019. Quality of patient
information in emergency department. International Journal of Health Care Quality
Assurance, 32(1), pp.108-119.
Heart, T., Ben-Assuli, O. and Shabtai, I., 2017. A review of PHR, EMR and EHR integration: A
more personalized healthcare and public health policy. Health Policy and Technology, 6(1),
pp.20-25.
Quigley, J.M., Thompson, J.C., Halfpenny, N.J. and Scott, D.A., 2019. Critical appraisal of
nonrandomized studies—A review of recommended and commonly used tools. Journal of
evaluation in clinical practice, 25(1), pp.44-52.
Rousseau, D.M. and Gunia, B.C., 2016. Evidence-based practice: The psychology of EBP
implementation. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, pp.667-692.