Analyses of the Decision Support Systems Programmed for the IOM 80/20 Nursing Initiative

One of the goals of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) initiative: Analysing the Cost of Alternative Strategies Related to Nursing Education is to re-organize the nursing workforce in the United States so that after a relatively brief time, ten years or so, eighty per cent of the nursing workforce will consist of nurses with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree while, then by definition, the remaining twenty per cent will be Associate Degree & Diploma nurses. [The 80/20 Initiative]. To aid health planners to create the information to develop the policies needed to effect The 80/20 Initiative Kovner, Lee, Lusk, Katigbak & Selander (2013) developed two Decision Support Systems [DSS]: The SWAP: DSS and the Dynamic Change: DSS. In this companion communication, we elaborate on the construal overview presented by Kovner et al. (2013). Specifically, we: (1) present the technical details of The SWAP and The Dynamic Change DSSs, (2) prove that the SWAP benchmark is the least expenditure alternative, and (3) offer extended “What-If” analysis enrichments useful in summarizing the voluminous decision information that could be generated by these DSSs. Presenting these critical technical details on the functionality of these DSSs will create the synergistic transparency needed to encourage the use of these DSSs by health planners.