One Audience, One Journal, One Structure: A Plan for Publishing a Heart Failure Follow-Up Improvement Project
Student Name
Doctor of Nursing Practice Program, Aspen University
DNP850: Nursing Practice, Professionalism, and Scholarship
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
One Audience, One Journal, One Structure: A Plan for Publishing a Heart Failure Follow-Up Improvement Project
Many DNP projects are presented locally and never published, so their lessons do not reach clinicians elsewhere. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal extends a project's reach and subjects it to review by peers. This paper plans the publication of a composite DNP improvement project on post-discharge follow-up for patients with heart failure. It defines the target audience, selects a journal using explicit criteria, structures the manuscript with the reporting guideline for improvement work, and addresses authorship and the risk of predatory publishers.
The Project and Its Findings
In a composite cardiology clinic, a nurse practitioner-led project scheduled clinic appointments before hospital discharge, built a daily worklist flagging discharged patients who still had no visit booked, and offered telehealth visits to patients without transportation. Over nine months, the share of patients with a clinic or telehealth visit in the first week after a heart failure discharge climbed from 39 to 68 percent. The introduction will place this in national context: in a large Medicare study, hospitals whose patients more often had early follow-up had lower 30-day readmission rates (Hernandez et al., 2010). Thirty-day readmissions fell from 24 percent to 19 percent, a change that was encouraging but not statistically conclusive given the sample size. Telehealth accounted for 22 percent of early visits.
Audience
The primary audience is nurse practitioners and nurse leaders in outpatient cardiology and primary care who manage patients after hospital discharge. They want practical, transferable methods: how appointments were scheduled before discharge, how the electronic list was built, how telehealth visits were structured, and what it took to sustain the change. A secondary audience is hospital case managers, but writing for both at once would dilute the paper; the manuscript will speak to outpatient clinicians and note implications for hospital partners. A paper written for everyone is read by no one in particular.
Selecting the Journal
Journals were compared on five criteria: readership that matches the audience; a scope that includes quality improvement reports; peer review and indexing in major databases such as MEDLINE and CINAHL; article types and word limits that fit the project; and cost, including any article processing charges. Three candidates were considered: a journal for nurse practitioners, a nursing quality journal, and a cardiovascular nursing journal. The journal for nurse practitioners best matches the audience and publishes quality improvement reports within a 3,500-word limit. The nursing quality journal is a strong second choice if the first declines. The cardiovascular nursing journal's readership is largely inpatient and research-focused, making it a weaker fit.
Before submission, the student will read recent issues of the chosen journal to understand the style and depth expected, and follow its author guidelines exactly.
Structuring the Manuscript With SQUIRE 2.0
The SQUIRE 2.0 guidelines provide a framework for reporting improvement work (Ogrinc et al., 2016). They ask authors to explain the local problem and its significance, the rationale for the intervention, the specific aims, the context in which the work took place, the intervention and how it changed over time, the approach to studying the intervention, the measures and analysis, the results including unintended consequences, and a discussion of lessons, limitations, and implications. The manuscript will follow this structure. Particular care will go to context, describing the clinic's size, staffing, and patient population, because readers need that information to judge whether the approach would work in their own setting, and to limitations, such as the absence of a comparison group and the inconclusive readmission result.
Authorship and Ethics
Authorship will be decided before writing begins. The DNP student will be first author, and the faculty mentor and the clinic's cardiologist, who helped design the telehealth pathway and will review drafts, will be coauthors if they meet accepted authorship criteria: substantial contribution to the work, participation in drafting or critical revision, approval of the final version, and accountability for the work. Contributors who helped without meeting these criteria, such as schedulers and the analyst, will be thanked in the acknowledgments. The manuscript will state that the project was reviewed and determined to be quality improvement rather than human subjects research, and no identifiable patient information will be included.
Avoiding Predatory Publishers
New authors are frequent targets of predatory journals, which solicit submissions by email, promise rapid publication, and charge fees without providing genuine peer review. In a review of 358 randomly selected articles from predatory nursing journals, most followed the expected structure of a research report but contained errors or were not pertinent to nursing, reflecting inadequate peer review and editorial processes (Oermann et al., 2018). Publishing in such a venue would not only waste the project but could damage the author's credibility. The student will submit only to the journal selected through the criteria above, verify its indexing and publisher, and ignore unsolicited invitations.
Complementary Formats
The manuscript is the plan's anchor, but two shorter formats will support it without diluting its audience. A poster at a regional nurse practitioner conference, submitted before the manuscript, will test how the message lands with the intended readers and generate questions the paper should answer. A one-page summary for the hospital's heart failure committee will share results with the partners whose case managers made pre-discharge scheduling possible, and it can be written in a single afternoon from the manuscript's results section. Neither replaces the journal article, which remains the durable, peer-reviewed record, but together they let the student refine the argument and thank collaborators before the paper appears. Presenting first also carries a small caution: some journals ask whether results have been presented, so the abstract and poster will be listed in the cover letter.
Timeline
Drafting will begin within one month of project completion, with a complete draft to coauthors at three months, revision at four months, and submission at five months. If the first journal declines, the manuscript will be revised in light of reviewers' comments and submitted to the second choice within six weeks.
Conclusion
Publishing the follow-up project will carry its lessons to nurse practitioners who face the same problem. The plan defines one audience, selects a fitting journal with explicit criteria, structures the manuscript with SQUIRE 2.0, settles authorship in advance, and guards against predatory publishers. Each decision serves the same goal: a paper that clinicians elsewhere can trust and use.
References
Hernandez, A. F., Greiner, M. A., Fonarow, G. C., Hammill, B. G., Heidenreich, P. A., Yancy, C. W., Peterson, E. D., & Curtis, L. H. (2010). Relationship between early physician follow-up and 30-day readmission among Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for heart failure. JAMA, 303(17), 1716-1722. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.533
Oermann, M. H., Nicoll, L. H., Chinn, P. L., Ashton, K. S., Conklin, J. L., Edie, A. H., Amarasekara, S., & Williams, B. L. (2018). Quality of articles published in predatory nursing journals. Nursing Outlook, 66(1), 4-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.05.005
Ogrinc, G., Davies, L., Goodman, D., Batalden, P., Davidoff, F., & Stevens, D. (2016). SQUIRE 2.0 (Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence): Revised publication guidelines from a detailed consensus process. BMJ Quality & Safety, 25(12), 986-992. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2015-004411
How this DNP 850 Module 7 example is structured
DNP850 Module 7 papers often plan dissemination for a specific audience, venue and format. Aspen does not publish module deliverables, so check your classroom for the exact prompt. This example commits to one audience and venue, justifies the choice with criteria, applies the appropriate reporting guideline, addresses authorship and ethics and closes with a timeline.
DNP850 Module 7 questions, answered
What does DNP850 Module 7 usually ask for?
The module often asks for a dissemination plan that names a specific audience, venue and format for sharing your project, such as a journal manuscript, poster or presentation. Aspen does not publish module deliverables, so your classroom's instructions govern.
What reporting guideline fits a DNP improvement project?
SQUIRE 2.0, the Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence, which asks authors to describe the local problem, context, intervention and how it changed, how it was studied, results and limitations.
How can I recognize a predatory journal?
Warning signs include unsolicited invitations, promises of very rapid publication, fees without clear peer review and absence from major indexes. Choosing journals through explicit criteria and verifying indexing helps avoid them.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
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