In the Chapter 6 summary, Staggers and Nelson state, \"In a way all of us are al
ID: 122721 • Letter: I
Question
In the Chapter 6 summary, Staggers and Nelson state, "In a way all of us are already informatics nurses." Reflect on this summary statement and describe a scenario from your clinical experience where you manipulated data, information, and knowledge to make a wise decision. Focus specifically on the key concepts of data, information, knowledge and wisdom. What to you believe are the advantages and disadvantages of having a single shared consensus-driven model of terminology use? How can a single agreed model of terminology use (with linkages to a single terminology) help to integrate knowledge into routine clinical practice? Hospital C is looking to implement an EHR. It has been suggested that a NIS be hired. This position does not involve direct patient care and the administration is struggling with how to justify the position. How can this position be justified?
Explanation / Answer
Nursing Informatics is the "science and practice (that) integrates nursing, its information and knowledge, with information and communication technologies to promote the health of people, families, and communities worldwide." (adapted from IMIA Special Interest Group on Nursing Informatics 2009). The application of nursing informatics knowledge is empowering for all healthcare practitioners in achieving patient centered care.
Nurse informaticians work as developers of communication and information technologies, educators, researchers, chief nursing officers, chief information officers, software engineers, implementation consultants, policy developers, and business owners, to advance healthcare. Core areas of work include:
Technology is an integral part of any healthcare organization. To stay on the cutting edge, more facilities are recognizing the importance of having a healthcare IT professional on staff.
In their 2016 Leadership Survey, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) examines the latest trends in healthcare IT. According to their findings, 95 percent of respondents “view health IT as a strategically critical tool to help healthcare organizations be successful.”
This is good news if you’re interested in pursuing a career in a critically vital field. The majority of respondents to the survey said this type of role can help with efforts focused on patient care. This includes clinical integration, primary care provider efficiency, mandated quality metrics improvement, and care coordination.
As a nurse informatics specialist, you can help deliver better results by performing tasks such as these:
Being able to disseminate information and understand data can also help improve a healthcare organization’s patient outcomes and allow them to make better decisions.
Where You Can Work
Nursing informatics isn’t just needed in hospitals or large medical facilities. Other areas of the medical field—public health, pharmacology and global health—need the expertise and tech-savviness of a these professionals.
If you’re looking for a leadership role in nursing, informatics can also afford you that opportunity. Because you’ll be responsible for creating strategies, implementing policies and ensuring better patient care, specialists can be a great fit for someone looking to move into advanced nursing. According to the HIMSS survey, 71 percent of healthcare organizations employ a “clinical IT leader” such as a Chief Nursing Informatics Officer.
Organizations with this type of leadership role tended to place a higher importance on health IT than their counterparts, according to the survey.
Even if you’re not ready for an executive level position, there are plenty of roles available for skilled professionals. Jobs that fall under this umbrella include nurse managers, nurse communicators and nurse programmers. In general, an informatics job will require you to act as a technology liaison but you’ll be expected to complete other duties as well.
In today’s dynamic health systems, technology plays an important role in education and nursing work. So it seems necessary to study the role of nurses and highlight the need for appropriate information technology educational programs to integrate with the ever-increasing pace of technology.
A review accompanied by an extensive literature search in databases and a library search focused on the keywords were used. The criteria used for selecting studies primarily focused on nursing informatics and the importance of expertise in the effective use of information technology in all aspects of the nursing profession. In a critical assessment of emerging technologies, the key elements of nursing informatics implementation were considered as healthcare promotion, advanced systems, internet and network. In view of the nature and the development of the information age, it is required to receive necessary IT training for all categories of nurses.
Due to the fast development of technology, in order to effectively take advantage of information technology in nursing outcome and quality of health care and to empower nurses; educational arrangement is recommended to set short-term and long-term specialized courses focusing on four target groups: studying, working, graduate, senior undergraduate, and graduate doctoral. The result of this study is expected to assist educational providers with program development.
The history, definition and competencies of nursing informatics indicate the importance of this field. It shows nurses are integrated into the field of IT automatically. So they should be able to deal with it successfully to improve quality of care outcome. In this regard it is required to study the influence of nursing informatics on health care and make bold the appropriate information technology educational needs for nurses.
The advantages of applying information technology in all aspects of nursing, including clinical areas, management, education and research and its influence on health care have been reviewed. Today, the subjects of clinical nursing information systems, decision support systems and medical diagnostic systems are associated with collecting patient information. Regarding the technology-rich environment, health care and hospital information systems developers, the quality of care is improving. For increasing patient safety and its leading to an evidence-based nursing, nursing informatics has been enhanced for students and graduates by Columbia school of nursing. The study has proved that informatics competence is a prerequisite to improving patient care (Bakken et al., 2003). Technology and using multimedia integrated into nursing curriculum can promote the use of informatics tools as an integral practice component and increase patient safety (Norton et al., 2006).
Managers can improve efficiency and performance through information systems and new technologies. In addition, several studies have confirmed the impact of careful shift planning and efficient management on nurse’s work and the quality of health care. Information is the source of all management activities. Nursing care is an industry service and its product is patient care. Information technology can promote the nursing management outcome. Internet-based nurse scheduling systems are mostly designed according to the self-scheduling model and need refining by the manager who overviews proper distribution, it causes uniform resource allocation in scheduling and increases patient direct care time (Pierce et al., 2003). Implementing information systems can provide better access to evidence; it can affect the patient care quality and support evidence-based nursing.
Software tools to facilitate research are available in all medical fields (Kardan & Darvish, 2008). Nursing information system had an influence on clinical patterns and decreased the time nurses spent on indirect care (Darvish & Salsali, 2010). This is critical to the health care professionals to assess, apply, report and manage data by the help of new tools of the information age (Hall, 1995).
Although using decision support systems can lead to a safer care, it may impair critical thinking. The need for excessive working time could cause some delay in the nursing job and reduce the quality of health care (Norton, 2006). Researchers recommended considering the following:
Justification of NIS in implementation of EHR
In recent years, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been implemented by an ever increasing number of hospitals around the world. There have, for example, been initiatives, often driven by government regulations or financial stimulations, in the USA, the United Kingdom and Denmark. EHR implementation initiatives tend to be driven by the promise of enhanced integration and availability of patient data, by the need to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness , by a changing doctor-patient relationship toward one where care is shared by a team of health care professionals, and/or by the need to deal with a more complex and rapidly changing environment.
EHR systems have various forms, and the term can relate to a broad range of electronic information systems used in health care. EHR systems can be used in individual organizations, as interoperating systems in affiliated health care units, on a regional level, or nationwide. Health care units that use EHRs include hospitals, pharmacies, general practitioner surgeries, and other health care providers.
The implementation of hospital-wide EHR systems is a complex matter involving a range of organizational and technical factors including human skills, organizational structure, culture, technical infrastructure, financial resources, and coordination. As Grimson et al. argue, implementing information systems (IS) in hospitals is more challenging than elsewhere because of the complexity of medical data, data entry problems, security and confidentiality concerns, and a general lack of awareness of the benefits of Information Technology (IT). Boonstra and Govers provide three reasons why hospitals differ from many other industries, and these differences might also affect EHR implementations. The first reason is that hospitals have multiple objectives, such as curing and caring for patients, and educating new physicians and nurses. Second, hospitals have complicated and highly varied structures and processes. Third, hospitals have a varied workforce including medical professionals who possess high levels of expertise, power, and autonomy. These distinct characteristics justify a study that focuses on the identification and analysis of the findings of previous studies on EHR implementation in hospitals.