At the heart of any Magnet designation is the institution’s ability to demonstrate that it routinely implements evidence-based practice (EBP) and quality improvement (QI) initiatives that both optimize safety and clinical outcomes for patients and promote professional satisfaction among the nursing staff.
Magnet designation is based on five essential Model Components:
- Transformational leadership
- Structural empowerment
- Exemplary professional practice
- New knowledge, innovation, and improvements
- Empirical quality results
Achieving Magnet designation requires a top-down commitment from leadership and an investment in the necessary tools and training. Wolters Kluwer’s Ovid® Synthesis is designed to help support nurses in their efforts to implement EBP and QI initiatives and directly supports institutional efforts to achieve Magnet designation status.
Tools of the trade
Ovid Synthesis provides intuitive, structured workflows that support collaboration, quality research, and ease of export to Magnet-ready formats. The technology helps nurses and researchers create focused PICOT research queries — using the standard Patient/Population/Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Timeframe format — and then conducts targeted literature searches and curates the most relevant clinical findings. These findings are provided in Evidence Tables that align with the requirements of the Magnet program and can be accessed by multiple stakeholders throughout the project to enable effective collaboration. Projects are disseminated with a click of a button and can be automatically populated into a Magnet OO11 Research Table, saving valuable time and resources.
Ovid Synthesis includes four standard templates that integrate directly with requirements of the Magnet project, greatly reducing time and effort for hospitals seeking initial designation or periodic redesignation. These include:
- Nursing research
- Evidence-based practice
- Quality improvement
- Literature review
Ovid Synthesis is also designed to streamline and automate the time-consuming effort that is required to disseminate clinical findings by including a variety of automated formats such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, poster, and manuscript formats. At every step of the way, the Ovid Synthesis workflow solution is guided by — and aligns directly with — the requirements of the Magnet program.
Magnet designated hospitals and healthcare settings place a high premium on shared governance — ensuring that nurses have an active role, voice, and seat at the table when it comes to identifying and devising solutions to enable EBP and continued QI. However, time and resource constraints and inconsistent experience and training often make it challenging for individual nurses. The cloud-based Ovid Synthesis system provides a range of intuitive decision-support tools, such as embedded pop-ups and drop-down messages that offer step-by-step guidance at every step of the process.
The system is designed to enable collaboration among peers and mentors. It provides project and executive-level dashboards that allow participants to track in-progress projects. This real-time collaboration and enhanced visibility breaks down silos, improves team members' communication, eliminates effort redundancy within and across teams, and fosters a more collaborative culture — additional hallmarks of any institution seeking Magnet designation.
Case in point
The Portland VA Medical Center in Oregon, a Magnet Hospital, uses Ovid Synthesis to empower its nurses to carry out high-quality research using a standardized process. The Portland VA recently undertook a project to update the standard protocol for monitoring non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to identify at-risk patients. Ovid Synthesis helped the Portland VA staff to identify a proven EBP approach to test a new screening and referral process to improve patient care and outcomes. The use of Ovid Synthesis has improved overall patient safety and clinical outcomes at the facility and fostered a spirit of engagement among the nursing staff.
For any hospital or healthcare institution, the ability to achieve Magnet designation brings many tangible benefits. The effort itself can be challenging, especially as the nursing workforce is often time and resource-constrained. However, implementing a workflow solution that directly mirrors the requirements of the Magnet program — providing step-by-step support, streamlining the process of carrying out research to support EBP and QI initiatives, and simplifying the process of disseminating the findings — is a critical step in supporting efforts to achieve this valuable designation.
Learn more about how to utilize Ovid Synthesis for your evidence-based practice needs and book a demo.
