Each year, billions of dollars are spent transferring residents from nursing homes to hospitals. The Sinclair School of Nursing is examining how a common form of communication — texting — can be used by nursing home staff to speed up decision-making and prevent the decline of residents’ health that can lead to costly and traumatic hospital transfers.

To help address this costly and stressful issue, a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help the researchers show how nursing home staff can securely use HIPAA-compliant text messages to speed up decision-making in a way that can allow residents to be safely cared for in the nursing home without the need for a traumatic transfer to the hospital.

Kimberly Powell, is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing and the grant’s principal investigator. Collaborators include Mihail Popescu, David Mehr, Suhwon Lee and Greg Alexander.

A diversity supplement was added to this grant in November 2023. The objective of the diversity supplement research project is to describe how pain assessment and management is represented in text messages exchanged among an interdisciplinary care team about nursing home residents with dementia and to explore how pain assessment and management contributes to avoidable hospital transfer. The researchers hypothesize that pain assessment and management will be represented more frequently in text messages about residents with dementia whose transfer was classified as avoidable compared to transfers classified as unavoidable. Findings from this diversity supplement research can inform future studies aimed at parsing out pain from other causes of behavioral symptoms. Ashley Woods, a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing, is supported by this diversity supplement.