Information technology as an infrastructure for patient safety: nursing research needs.

This article describes the process utilized to create research questions which promote technology as an infrastructure to enable safe nursing practice. Beginning with scenarios of safety problems related to nursing practice, the team identified information technology including hardware, software, and organizational and operational components to help improve the safety aspects addressed in the scenarios. Further discussed are characteristics of technology necessary at each step in the nursing process and finally recommendations are presented for various research questions that would be needed to enable research on the use of the proposed technologies.