School of Nursing 220808

Robert J. Lucero, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN

Dr. Lucero’s research is leading the way to inform infrastructure development for data-driven knowledge generation that serves as a model for organizations across the United States (US) to improve the quality of care for hospitalized older adults. He is leveraging electronic patient, clinical, and administrative data and data science methods to identify valid, modifiable factors that predict hospital-acquired falls (HAF), which affect annually approximately one million US hospitalized patients. Studies he published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing and the Journal of Advanced Nursing showed that, in 168 US hospitals, poor nursing care quality was associated with more adverse patient events, including HAF. Using artificial intelligence approaches with electronic health record (EHR) data, Dr. Lucero discovered a set of six new clinical and organizational factors that can predict HAF published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. His lab also explores the use of registered nurses’ (RNs’) progress notes, or text data, to predict HAF. They were the first to publish in eGEMs that RNs’ notes contain information about clinical, environmental, and organizational factors that can predict fall risk. The other cornerstone of his research program is developing health information technology (HIT) to promote chronic disease self-management. He pioneered and published in Applied Clinical Informatics a HIT design approach, known as Consumer-centered Participatory Design (C2PD), that has been used in multiple HIT development and systematic review articles. Unlike other design approaches, C2PD provides public health and community-based organizations, academic researchers, and commercial designers with a theoretically informed approach that engages consumer throughout the development and evaluation of HIT. C2PD builds on the strengths and resources within a community, promotes a collaborative learning and empowering process, facilitates collaborative partnerships, and incorporates four components of HIT design, namely; user preferences, functions, tasks, and representational requirements, to develop highly usable systems. His lab demonstrated that using the C2PD approach resulted in a highly useful and usable fall prevention self-management system for English- and Spanish-speaking older adults.