Importance of Nursing Informatics in Healthcare: Role of Nurse Informaticist

Discussion Importance of Nursing Informatics for a Nurse Informaticist

Nursing Informatics is a developing area which has the potential to provide improved healthcare and better health outcome. It involves nursing specialists who merge their nursing skills along with appropriate technical knowledge together to deliver enhanced patient care services. Informatics helps to bring advanced technology in the daily routine of a nurse, helping them to analyze complex health issues, monitor patient records, and achieve a new efficient health care system for the patients(Crowhurst, Bergin & Wells, 2019). This paper primarily focuses on the importance of informatics and technology in the field of medicine and its subsequent execution by the nursing professions who are efficient in both areas intending to provide better health outcomes.

Nursing informatics is different from healthcare informatics, as the later is involved in administrative issues, whereas, nursing informatics mainly deals with patient care. Nurse informatics is also involved with quality control, system up-gradation, or giving health education and initial training to other junior staff. Other tasks include monitoring quality initiatives, analysis of the clinical status, managing patient health records and also takes part in the optimization of overall system performance. They also ensure that the tools and technologies employed in patient health care are user-friendly for the staff using them. Techniques that are currently used in health informatics include “Computerized Provider Order Entry”(CPOE) and “Electronic Medical Records”(EMR). EMR is used to prepare digitalized patient records, including all the test results and progression reports(Strudwick et al, 2017).

In the health care system, nurse informaticists are used in delivering computerized medication prescriptions, running mobile laboratories and measure the progress of patients in real-time, reducing the frequency of error in the data. They integrate both clinical and technical information to provide efficient patient care and productive workflow(Sawerr, Stevens & Martin, 2018). They help in formulating strategies to convert the analytics of an algorithm into improved patient care and safety. Technology assists the nurse to monitor and anticipate patient needs more effectively, and also interprets, evaluates data based on care outcomes such as cost-saving, utilization of medical resources and disease management.

The health care leaders use informatics, which provides them the essential information to make decisions about the enhancement of technological process and serve the patients better. It ensures whether correct data is given to the clinician, making it easier for them to make necessary decisions(Vydiswaran et al, 2019). By incorporating the preferences of the patient, they will be able to gain their trust. Data-driven decisions help in creating strategies for process improvement and integrate information into the workflow.

Role of Nurse Informaticists in a Healthcare Organization

Though the recent advancement in technology led to well accessible and improved health care, the privacy of the patient or doctors, nurses are a matter of great concern today. Many regulatory compliance requirements, such as the “US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA”) and “EU General Data Privacy Regulation “(GDPR), serve to protect the privacy of patients and health professionals(Haldar et al, 2020).

Leakage of patient data can cause significant adverse personal and social impacts on their families, and also invite a considerable financial loss. These organizations help to protect medical status as a guarded secret. Protected health information (PHI) helps to identify a patient(Iyengar, Kundu & Pallis, 2018). However, in HIPAA does genomic data (which provides more details about a patient) is not included and even the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) also does not have a standard body which identifies genomic data as a highly sensitive personal information.

The fully engaged nurses have higher job satisfaction levels than the other nurse and are more dedicated to their responsibilities or duties regarding patient care, they stick through the organization through thick and thin, thus reducing turnover. The patient experience is also improved as they provide high-quality and safe care.

Full nurse engagement leads to improved health care, thus lowering mortality rate and health complexities among patients. According to the data provided by the “ National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators”, higher nurse engagement resulted in around 86% decrease in infection rate over a span of two years. Moreover fully engaging the nurse in the healthcare organization will help to earn the loyalty of the employee and improved healthcare delivery(Landon et al, 2019).

The career of nurse informatics aims to provide improved management and communication in the field of health care. It also helps to boost efficiency, reduce expense and deliver better patient care. A nurse informaticist helps to integrate data and knowledge for giving support to the patients, novice nurses and other health care providers. They are also involved in documentation and communication, which helps to deliver efficient, improved and high-quality health care to patients.

Although nurse informatics has lead to improved patient care and more optimized health care system development, recently it is facing many challenges. One of the biggest issues is the lack of data integration in the computer system or software, other problems are lack of support of the administration, fear of user acceptance, absence of a proper strategic plan or framework of the organization, poor software design which is not user-friendly along with a deficiency in infrastructure and time management. And sometimes data are not available for decision-making purposes(Jefferey, 2019).

Importance of Informatics in Decision Making

As a whole, it can be said that the demand for nurse informaticists in the field of medicine is increasing on a daily basis. Within the health care system, they are involved in administration, leadership, and management. They are also involved in the analysis of data which helps them to construct a proper decision-making framework and management of patient health outcomes. A nurse informaticist is associated with Compliance and Integrety Management by establishing technical process and revising the operational procedures.

In conclusion, it can be stated that, though the field of health informatics has been there for a long time, it is not yet matured enough and has some major issues and concerns associated with it that need to be taken care of immediately. Apart from that, it is evident from the last shreds of evidence that technology has brought the field of medicine to a new level by providing efficient and improved health care to patients. It employs modern tools and software which provide better monitoring and diagnosis. Thus, it can be said that the field of health informatics has great potential to give new insights and bring newer possibilities in the field of medicine.

References:

Crowhurst, N., Bergin, M., & Wells, J. (2019). Implications for nursing and healthcare research of the general data protection regulation and retrospective reviews of patients’ data. Nurse researcher, 27(1).

Haldar, S., Mishra, S. R., Pollack, A. H., & Pratt, W. (2020). Informatics opportunities to involve patients in hospital safety: a conceptual model. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(2), 202-211.

Iyengar, A., Kundu, A., & Pallis, G. (2018). Healthcare informatics and privacy. IEEE Internet Computing, 22(2), 29-31.

Jeffery, A. D. (2019). ANI Emerging Leader Project: Identifying Challenges and Opportunities in Nursing Data Science. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 37(1), 1-3.

Landon, L., Crane, S., Nance, S., Stegenga, K., Cherven, B., Prado, L. N. P., ... & Haase, J. (2019). Engaging Clinical Nurses in Research: Nurses' Experiences Delivering a Communication Intervention in a Behavioral Oncology Clinical Trial. Nursing administration quarterly, 43(2), 175-185.

Sawyerr, C., Stevens, K., Martin, S., & JD, C. (2018). SINI 2018: The Security Informatics Nurse Specialist Role.

Strudwick, G., Booth, R. G., Bjarnadottir, R. I., Collins, S., & Srivastava, R. (2017). Exploring the role of the nurse manager in supporting point-of-care nurses’ adoption of electronic health records: protocol for a qualitative research study. BMJ open, 7(10), e018129.

Vydiswaran, V. V., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., & Xu, H. (2019). Special issue of BMC medical informatics and decision making on health natural language processing.