Big Data Challenges from a Nursing Perspective

Abstract

Nursing’s holistic perspective and focus on responses to actual or potential health problems has significant implications for the benefits, promise, and challenges of big data streams and data science methods for nursing. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the benefits and key challenges related to big data streams and data science from the perspective of nursing. The benefits and challenges are considered from the components of data governance, data science infrastructure, and data science pipeline and illustrated through six case examples: (a) electronic health records and symptom science, (b) omics, (c) dementia caregiving and social media, (d) prediction and Sepsis Campaign, (e) intelligent sensors and aging in place, and (f) dashboards and nurse numeracy and graph literacy. In addition, two cross-cutting issues (ethical conduct of research and data science competencies) are addressed. Both the availability of data sources to address questions of interest to nurses and reports of the application of data science methods by nurses are on the rise. Expanding the data science infrastructure available to nurses and improving the data science competencies of nurses in various roles are key foundational priorities to increase the use of data science to advance nursing science, patient care, and health.