CRITICAL PRODUCT:

Critical Portfolio™

What is a Critical Portfolio™?

Early advocates, in the days of paper portfolios, recommended placing all important documents related to professional development in a shoe box so that they would be handy when needed. Recent catastrophic weather events like tornados in the mid-west and Rita and Katrina in the southern U.S. clearly demonstrate that a shoe box is not the way to protect a lifetime of professional development documentation. Critical Portfolio™, the first of its kind web-based portfolio management solution, acts an automated safety deposit box for all professional documentation.

Who Needs a Critical Portfolio™?

This fully customizable, automated portfolio solution provides healthcare organizations, nursing professionals and academia alike the ability to develop, organize, manage and maintain portfolios – replacing the cumbersome and vulnerable hard copy processes of yesterday.

Critical Portfolios for Healthcare Organizations

Today, healthcare organizations are required to maintain professional portfolios in order to attain and keep Magnet Status. A few of the many ways in which Critical Portfolio can benefit the organization include:

Accreditation: Accreditation recognition from a wide variety of accrediting bodies in an integral part of doing business for today’s healthcare organization. Data required by surveyors can be extensive and is often located in a variety of different systems in the healthcare organization. The electronic professional portfolio acts as the single repository for all professional development activities. With an electronic portfolio in place, surveyor data requests are just a few mouse clicks away.
Magnet Recognition: Professional development information needed to complete much of the Magnet Recognition documentation is traditionally housed in disparate information systems if it is housed in an information system at all. Aggregation of the Magnet data can be cumbersome at best and is further exacerbated when the information is not in an electronic format. Those organizations which implement a Critical Portfolio will greatly ease the aggregation of difficult to obtain information.
Recruitment and Retention: The implementation of professional portfolios for nursing staff is a relatively low cost benefit that reinforces the organizations commitment to a climate of continuing professional development.
Productivity & Reporting: Automated reporting and maintenance of your nursing professional’s portfolios results in increased Nurse Manager productivity and improved organizational reporting.

Critical Portfolios for Nursing Professionals

Nurse Professionals are required to maintain their own personal profession portfolios to demonstrate professional abilities, achievements and clinical efforts both to potential employers, and increasingly to nursing certification bodies who issue advanced nursing credentials. These professionals need a secure and accessible location to store, update and report on all of this information. Critical Portfolio provides many additional benefits to the individual including:

Recruitment: The professional portfolio is becoming the expectation in many organizations in which nursing leadership seeks to develop and maintain a cultural climate of continuing professional competency. Nurses who assemble their professional portfolios will have a differentiating factor when compared with nurses submitting resumes when applying for a new position. Those seeking employment in an organization with a culture of continuing professional competency will be seen as a better “cultural fit”.
Licensure and Certification: Several states are examining the processes by which continuing professional competency will be evaluated. The days of simply completing continuing education for the purposes of license renewal are drawing to a close. Revamping of re-licensure processes by state legislatures and boards of nursing are considering portfolio evaluation as a method or component of the re-licensure process.
Tailored Portfolios: Compiling a comprehensive web-based repository of professional development documentation enables the sharing of a portfolio tailored specifically to the recipient. Multiple portfolios can be created from the single repository of professional development data. The professional nurse can include those professional development activities to include in the portfolio based on the intended recipient (e.g., manager for evaluation, peer for collaboration or perspective employer).

Critical Portfolios for Academia

Many nursing education programs are including portfolios as a required element of course work in order to better position their students for employment post-graduation. Nurse educators are in a position to lead my example and demonstrate their commitment to life-long learning by using their portfolios as an example of what the professional portfolio has evolved to today.

Tenure: Nursing faculty must produce significant documentation for evaluation and application for tenure. A well developed electronic portfolio will not only serve to ease the process burden, but also the strain on one’s back by deceasing the binders that must be hauled to the evaluation!
Accreditation: Nursing education programs are subject to a variety of accreditation processes both internal and external. Portfolio assembly for each faculty member is usually a part of this process. All the benefits of data sharing and aggregation experienced by the healthcare organization undergoing accreditation previously mentioned would be experienced by the nursing education program in much the same fashion.

What does Critical Portfolio™ Manage?

Professional Licenses and Certifications
Educational plan including classes and seminars
Memberships, honors, awards, grants, and scholarships
Professional leadership, committee involvement and community service activities
Publications
Personal goals
Case logs papers
Research and student activities
Bookmarked web links
Documents of Interest
And more!

Where Do I Learn More About Critical Portfolio™?

For more information about Critical Portfolio, or any of Decision Critical’s products, contact us directly at (800) 770-9082, moreinfo@decisioncritical.com, or visit our website at www.decisioncritical.com.

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