Moving to a culture of nurse as knowledge worker and a new way of knowing in nursing.

In this paper, the authors speculate on the future of nursing practice as it will be informed by emerging technologies for the management of clinical information and knowledge and the generation of new understandings. It is postulated that without a concomitant effort to transform nursing practice, the fulsome benefits of electronic health records and associated tools will not be realized for nurses, other clinicians and patients. The path to creating a nursing practice culture of integrated knowledge management necessitates new thinking about clinical care delivery and an expansion of the ways of knowing in nursing. For the purpose of this paper, clinical practice transformation is defined as: moving beyond the form and function of nursing practice as we know it today by boldly advancing the redesign of clinical processes and being open to emerging transformative possibilities within society and healthcare through the use of technology.