Vision Statement: Our patients deserve the best continuity of care possible. With that said, our nurses should effectively communicate patient information with our physicians in order to ensure the best treatment for acute condition changes in order to prevent hospital readmissions.

This presentation explains the role of skilled nursing facilities in the reduction of hospital readmissions.

"In attempts to reduce nosocomial infections, the focus of PPE is shifted to include patient protection.

This innovation project will help lead the healthcare organization to better health deliver and better service because it will prevent transmission of nosocomial infections between patients via hospital staff. Patients with HAI’s tend to have a longer duration hospital stay as well as more costs. Likewise, current healthcare reform restricts reimbursements for treatments associated with nosocomial infections. By minimizing these costly infections, the healthcare organization will be able to realize a greater profit."

A short and thickened lingual frenulum characterizes tongue-ties. Infants with this condition are likely to have issues with their latch, weight gain, and the ability to breastfeed exclusively. Mothers typically struggle with nipple pain and trauma. Tongue-tie procedures have become increasingly more popular as families turn to this intervention when struggling with breastfeeding.

The purpose of this quality improvement project is to collect data on tongue-tie revision procedures to explore the benefits, risks, and patient satisfaction with the clinical process. Questionnaires were created to collect information on tongue-tie revisions. Participants were asked to identify symptoms related both to the mother and infant. The type of feeding was assessed before and after to identify if the tongue-tie revisions increased exclusive breastfeeding. Likert-type scales were used to address maternal nipple pain, overall improvements in breastfeeding, and patient experience.

A total of 36 participants completed the pre-op questionnaire, and 22 completed the post-op questionnaires over four months. The results found that this was a low-risk procedure that helped improve breastfeeding or maternal and infant symptoms. There should be continued efforts to find ways to continue to collect this data, as it will increase the awareness of tongue-tie’s effect on breastfeeding.

Topsy is an online analytical tool that evaluates millions of archived and real-time tweets based on their relevancy to a specific criterion. This report studies what Topsy considers relevant, how to create a relevant tweet, the accuracy of Topsy’s relevancy score and whether Topsy is an acceptable tool for use in gauging class participation. After thorough investigation, Topsy was determined to be a great analytical tool for monitoring Twitter participation, yet lacks the fundamental ability to distinguish between tweets relevant to coursework and tweets relevant to everything else.

Access to reliable electricity is at least a co-requisite to sufficient human development. In many developing countries, the percentages of the rural population that have electricity access are often below 5%. Specifically in Uganda, only about 2% of the rural population is currently served by the electric grid. To create effective policy and implementation programs, this paper examines the current challenges and implications of the current energy sector of Uganda. Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems framework is employed to organize the driving forces, interactions, and key players of the current system, including recent rural electrification programs that have resulted in some success. However, the implications of the current system include multiple barriers to widespread rural electrification, including high costs and little revenue. The push for solar photovoltaic systems in Uganda also has many shortcomings to improving development within the country. I end by discussing an alternative approach to rural electrification called the Empower Ugandans to Power Uganda Project that offers a locally driven effort to electrification and development.