Smartphone and Tablet Apps

HIPAA-compliant apps are a great supplemental tool to assist healthcare providers in the treatment of eating disorders. Using an app in practice and treatment can allow the dietitian to obtain a substantial amount of information from the patient that may not be available otherwise. Apps for eating disorder treatment may serve as food diaries, but without the portion sizes, calories or macronutrient information. Apps can prompt the patient to answer questions at meal time, such as:

• How do you feel?
• Where, when and with whom did you eat?
• Was your portion size too small, too large or just right?

This information is then available to dietitians in real time, so they can check on a patient’s progress at any time. Patients also can upload pictures of their meals for the clinician to see. Messaging features within treatment apps allow the patient and dietitian to have HIPAA-compliant communication between visits. This allows the RDN to give the patient positive reinforcement outside of a face-to-face visit.

The dietitian can see a comprehensive overview of how patients are doing, both emotionally and with their eating. This eliminates the need for spending significant amounts of time during a session gathering this information.

Virtual Counseling Via Video Calls

Virtual counseling is a growing practice. Many RDNs are using this method of counseling in private practice. Because eating disorder treatment can be very intensive, virtual appointments can be beneficial when patients don’t have time for an in-person session as often as their treatment plan recommends. A benefit to virtual counseling is that if the patient moves (a common example would be a high school student who moves away to college) they can continue treatment with the same dietitian. This can help alleviate stress during chaotic times and assure that treatment continues as planned.

As dietitians, it is important that we utilize technology as it becomes available to us. The treatment of eating disorders is no easy task, but incorporating technology into traditional practice can make the experience more seamless and effective for both dietitians and their patients.

The post Technology and Management of Eating Disorders appeared first on HealthStylz.

The fields of nutrition and health informatics are changing rapidly and the opportunities available to advance the dietetic profession have exploded in the past year. The Nutrition Informatics Committee is celebrating 10 years of innovative technology and the use of informatics at the Academy.

Fun fact: Did you know that 3 percent of the Academy’s membership currently work in the informatics field?

We are proud to once again host our annual Genius Zone Booth, located at the Academy Avenue at FNCE.  There will be dietitians from multiple areas of nutrition informatics in the booth with different topic expertise, and you can receive a download on how to access Academy resources to level up your career, regardless of practice area — even as a student or intern!

Stop by and network with us and learn about:

• Optimizing your dietetics student & intern experience
• CEU opportunity with the “10×10” Health Informatics Certificate Course
• CEUs and new knowledge with our online Nutrition Informatics Certificate of Training
• Member apps you can trust and recommend
• What the Academy Interoperability and Standards Committee is doing to forward inclusion of better nutrition documentation in EHRs nationwide, and how you can advocate for this
• New health IT advances such as SMART on FHIR and HealthIT.gov videos
• Nutrition software systems information
• Social media for the modern RDN

Also, take a survey and enter a drawing to win the Academy’s Nutrition Informatics Certificate of Training ($120 value). Follow us on Twitter at #FNCE and #GeniusZone to find out when expert members of the Academy Nutrition Informatics Committee will be available to network.

Come get involved and join the charge in advocating for nutrition technology as we proudly begin our Second Century as registered dietitian nutritionists. 

The post Calling All Dietetic Geniuses! appeared first on HealthStylz.

As a dietitian at a nutrition software company, it’s my job to ensure the development team understands the business needs of our customers. The user experience — what users are thinking, feeling and doing while using a product — is always on my mind. Software focused on the user experience is not created in isolation; it is a constant feedback loop among developers, business experts and users.

If you use a nutrition or health application in your practice, your perspective has value and could help shape nutrition technologies of the future. To create software for food and nutrition professionals, a deep understanding is required of the unique challenges they face. One of the ways we foster this understanding is through focus groups.

A focus group is a gathering of product users who help guide the development process. It’s advantageous to have a broad cross-section of users with different perspectives and experiences. Typically, a moderator leads a discussion with the goal of understanding the user experience, as well as the needs and workflow of typical users. Participants of the group build on each other’s ideas, prioritize the importance of new features and collectively drive innovation forward.

Dietitians are the experts on food and nutrition. Engaging in the design and implementation of nutrition informatics systems will help create future technology that enhances our practice. Technology can increase efficiency, help keep patients and clients safe and promote health and nutrition.

Focus groups are one way to get involved by adding your voice to the development of new technologies — but there are many other ways. Engage with health and nutrition IT vendors, investigate user communities for the applications you use and follow along with the Academy’s efforts to include nutrition in IT standards. Tomorrow’s nutrition technologies will only improve through the dedicated expertise of food and nutrition experts like you. 

The post Dietitians are Shaping Future Technology — and You Can, Too appeared first on HealthStylz.

In science and technology, we are constantly pushing boundaries. This same “moonshot” approach can be applied to how we help consumers make better food choices.

I had the opportunity to support these efforts as a nutrition intern working with an on-site restaurant company and a leading technology corporation. The goal of this partnership was to create healthy eating systems, applying behavioral science and nutrition-focused concepts with cutting-edge techniques. At the tech corporation, each encounter with food is viewed as an opportunity to fuel a conversation for the next “moonshot” idea — a conversation that adds to a culture not only pushing for innovation but inspiring a more sustainable lifestyle.

Among the company’s ongoing efforts to influence food literacy, dietary habits and overall wellbeing are the strides they are taking to reinvent corporate foodservice with a vision to impact the global food system. Their on-site café has its own teaching kitchen offering hands-on interaction with talented chefs. The classes function to enable and enhance culinary skills and food literacy among the company staff, thus leading to positive food experiences that can be shared away from work in homes and communities.

Another effort to nudge users toward making more informed food choices is through behavioral science. This concept explores the influences of choice and how businesses can design environments that either provide or reinforce healthy choices. Appeal, vivid messaging and food item imagery can all impact choice. With this concept in mind, I had the opportunity to create “bite-size” nutrition and health information for the company’s micro-kitchen seasonal fruit bowls. The fruit signage reflected a new approach for labeling fruit within the micro-kitchen. For each category of fruit, I wrote a description that included the fruit’s physical appearance and flavor profile, highlighting its health benefits.

Simple communication messages that are strategically placed and timed can direct an individual toward choosing the healthier option. Organizations are seeking solutions to create better eating environments that promote health, productivity and community. As dietitians, let’s join forces with these forward-thinking businesses to create a more sustainable and responsible future. 

The post Food Informatics: A “Moonshot” Approach to Driving Positive Food Choices appeared first on HealthStylz.

Breast-feeding provides numerous benefits to women and their babies but support is essential. From providing anticipatory guidance during pregnancy to reaching moms during their hospital stay and checking on them at home, health care providers and peer counselors have the ability to provide parents with evidence-based information and resources to not only help them make better decisions about breast-feeding but to maintain breast-feeding — even through the challenging times.

Mobile apps and tools for providing breast-feeding support are transforming how moms receive care.  “Telelactation” allows a board-certified lactation consultant to reach moms in rural areas and also when limited time and busy lifestyles get in the way of “seeing” how a mom and her new baby are doing during this important time.

Watching the baby latch via webcam, answering questions about milk supply, and providing that “just-in-time” education all are services that can help make a difference in a mom’s breast-feeding experience. Online support groups also can connect new moms who may feel isolated during those first few weeks at home. Research in this area is growing, and it is exciting to see how it will develop. Dietitians who also are lactation consultants (a great career opportunity) or who partner with lactation consultants can take advantage of these tools and help moms — one latch at a time.

The post Virtual Breast-feeding Support: Helping Moms One Latch at a Time appeared first on HealthStylz.

 

Online, Personalized Purchases

According to the Nielsen Global Report, “The Future of Grocery,” 25 percent of online respondents reported they order grocery products online, and 55 percent are willing to do so in the future. Growth of online grocery shopping is driven in part by the maturation of digital natives—millennials and Generation Z. They like the convenience of buying groceries using their mobile devices. Online retailers can fulfill unique customer needs, such as the desire for a wide variety of foods as well as specialty products.

Additionally, in the last couple of years, the market has been flooded with app-based grocery delivery companies, which enlist employees to procure foods and other products from a variety of vendors and deliver it to your door. So, will clicks replace bricks? Not so fast. For many food buyers, including myself, there are powerful sensory experiences we don’t want to lose, like smelling freshly baked bread, checking the ripeness of fruit or checking for freshness of perishable products. At least for now, that is impossible to replicate online.

Smart Carts & Shopping Apps

To compete with online purchases, some retailers are working on tablet-laden smart carts with kinetic and body recognition sensors, which can provide aisle maps, calculate the best route through the store, tick items off your shopping list, give you recipe recommendations and even save you from pushing a heavy cart. There are also grocery shopping apps that are designed to create grocery shopping lists, share lists with others, use coupons, find deals, store recipes and organize your meals.

Cashier-less Stores

An innovative concept that’s being piloted in a Seattle grocery store lets customers walk in, grab food from the shelves and simply walk out again, without ever having to wait in a checkout line. No cash or credit cards, you just need your phone and the company account. Big retailers are following the trend with store apps where customers scan items with a phone as they shop, pay via the app and show the receipt from their phone on their way out.

Recreating the Supermarket Experience

Companies are focusing on how to create an experience that gives shoppers a reason to come to the store, considering that potential customers are increasingly buying groceries online. Some supermarkets offer wellness and health services, while others have brew pubs and restaurants inside to attract millennials.

As food and nutrition experts we are uniquely positioned to work with these companies to help customers make better food-buying decisions, positively impact public health and make grocery shopping enjoyable.

The post The Future of Grocery Shopping is Now appeared first on HealthStylz.

The Nutrition Care Process, or NCP, provides a framework for decision-making and a systematic approach to providing high-quality individualized care. The NCP Terminology, or NCPT, provides common verbiage in the form of a structured language that can help support the exchange of nutrition data. This standardization of the care process can allow RDNs to better speak the same language, help bridge gaps between patient encounters and promote a better continuum of nutrition care.  (Note: U.S. Transitions of Care requirements for certified electronic health records, or EHRs, now require mapping of eNCPT to mandated clinical terminologies, such as SNOMED-CT and LOINC).

With EHRs now fairly ubiquitous in most health care settings and RDNs using the same standardized process and terminologies on the EHR user interface (and backend for mapping), there is now a wealth of continuous information just waiting to be analyzed. By analyzing this data, researchers will be able to connect interventions with outcomes, and demonstrate the value from nutrition programs and interventions.

The Healthy Nutrition Academy Health Informatics Infrastructure, or ANDHII, was designed to allow RDNs to actively participate in research efforts to show the impact of nutrition interventions on patient outcomes — even by entering just one patient per week into ANDHII. De-identified patient data entered into ANDHII can be associated with a specific research project, general education and practice (for students or practitioners learning how to use the structured data entry), or electronically signed and submitted into the National Quality Improvement Pool, which when aggregated forms our  national Dietetics Outcomes Registry.  Contributing patient data to the registry adds to the evidence supporting nutrition practice, helps ensure high-quality patient care and can help justify funding for additional programs and staff.

The post Transforming Care through Data: One Patient at a Time appeared first on HealthStylz.

The word “research” can sometimes bring fear to the hearts of practitioners — particularly getting approval from hospital, university and government review boards. This is a necessary step and with a little patience, perseverance and help from the very friendly staff of these boards, you can overcome this hurdle before you know it. This was the case with the study I worked on — in the end, the hospital’s Institutional Review Board became champions for the cause, and we were able to collect the data we needed. This study did not require human subject consent, but I also have gathered data for a study that required consent and found the review process to be manageable and not burdensome.

The fastidiousness of data collection for research can be overwhelming. The transcription of data points from paper to electronic data collection calls for organization, precision and time management. These are all valuable skills worthy of CV inclusion. Keep in mind there will always be missing data, so just keep moving on.

The best part of the research I did was collaborating with physicians and nurses to improve enteral nutrition support in critical care. From a baseline survey, experts developed a strategy to implement the Canadian nutrition guidelines for six centers. What questions did we want to answer? Would we improve care by implementing the guidelines using the recommended strategy? There was a near 30 percent reduction in both ICU lengths of stay and ventilator days. Way to go team! And thanks to the Critical Care Nutrition at the Clinical Evaluation Research Unit for the strategy – it worked!

What can participating in research do for you? Collegial relationships are established with the research investigators. Skills are learned or refined to enhance a CV. Most important, there is the opportunity to improve patient care and the satisfaction of successfully completing a complicated task.

The Dietetics Practice Based Research Network, or DPBRN, has opportunities for RDNs to participate in research. Dietetic practice groups, member interest groups or state affiliates may also offer similar opportunities. Helping to gather data is just one more way that RDNs can help build evidence for dietetics practice and improve patient outcomes. 

Go with the flow, participate in research — and always respond to grad student surveys!

The post Make Research Part of Your Professional Path appeared first on HealthStylz.

 

Inspire Healthy Living

One of the biggest reasons it seems so many professionals choose to post on social media is to inspire and reach others. Fortunately for dietitians, food photography and healthy living continue to increase in popularity, and are easy to portray on social media. This presents a great opportunity to make social media a forum to share meal ideas and promote healthy living in general. Think about how many times you’ve scrolled past an appetizing meal on Instagram or Facebook and been enticed to make it. As dietitians, social media is the perfect chance for us to inspire healthy living effectively and instantaneously, simply through photos and short captions.

Spread Correct Information

Nutrition is personal; not all dietitians follow the same playbook. Some support a vegan lifestyle, some believe in calorie counting, and others believe clients should never step on the scale. The different beliefs that RDNs hold are OK because they’re all evidence-based and supported by research. Yet social media growth and interest in healthy living has come with a negative consequence — more false information spread by non-nutrition professionals. It’s up to us as nutrition experts to put out as much accurate information as possible to make sure that anyone simply browsing for nutrition advice receives correct information and is properly educated.

Broaden Your Reach

In spreading correct information, social media provides the perfect platform to educate the broad public. Not everyone can afford to see a dietitian in private practice and some people simply might rather search for information online. For this reason, we’re incredibly fortunate to be able to have a say in the information that people search for. The more people we’re able to reach means the more people we’re able to guide to better overall health.

Engage with Clients

Finally, although self-disclosure can be a bit tricky when it comes to the client-dietitian relationship, engaging with current or potential clients is one of the fun perks of social media. Many of my own clients have found me through Instagram, and enjoy the ability to engage with me directly on the app. Clients have told me that they enjoy seeing meals photos to get recipe ideas, and that interaction with a dietitian on social media makes the RDN much more relatable to them. With so many clients on social media, showing our personalities and viewpoints on the forum often helps build our rapport with clients, even before our initial sessions with them.

As nutrition experts and professionals, most of us recognize the genuine importance of spreading proper nutrition education to prevent disease and promote an overall healthy lifestyle. Social media allows us to reach clients outside of normal business hours, as well as the general public looking for nutrition advice. Through social media, we’re granted the perfect forum to make our (evidence-based) voices heard — it’s critical that we take advantage of that opportunity.

The post Dietitians on Social Media: Making Connections for Better Health appeared first on HealthStylz.

This fact immediately evoked memories of going through countless packs of 3-by-5-inch cards to make stacks of flashcards when I was a dietetic intern just six years ago. I threw away many 3-foot stacks of printed research articles, notes, books and essays when I moved out of my graduate school apartment.

There are many tools available to students that can help cut back on paper waste.  Here are some examples:

Learning management systems like Blackboard or Canvas allow students to submit papers and assignments online without printing them. These programs also allow instructors to share resources without printing copies for each student.

Cloud-based sharing sites like Dropbox, Google Docs and Office 365-based SharePoint allow students and instructors to easily share documents online in lieu of paper copies and to e-collaborate with each other.

Electronic textbooks and online study materials on computers, tablets and e-readers can help reduce costs and paper usage.

Programs like Quizlet and Cram allow students to create and access flashcards online instead of using paper materials

Many of these resources can continue to be used long after students receive a diploma. Continuing education programs use these types of technologies to disperse information. The Healthy Aging Dietetic Practice Group recently released flashcards on Quizlet to help dietitians study for the Certified Specialist in Gerontological Nutrition (CSG) exam. The flashcards can be viewed on a mobile app for easy studying wherever and whenever you have your mobile device.

Using these technologies in new, creative ways could help reduce paper waste in many areas of dietetic practice. Keep these programs in mind to use both at work and home — they could help reduce your paper waste and make your life easier and more efficient!

The post Using Technology To Reduce Paper Waste appeared first on HealthStylz.