NRS 450 Nursing Informatics Assignment
In this GCU NRS-450 Nursing Informatics Course, the focus is on the methods and technologies used to acquire, process, and analyze patient data, emphasizing information and communication technologies that support the documentation of care and effective communication among health team members at all system levels. Essentially, this course provides students with an understanding of the importance of professional and ethical standards pertaining to the regulation and security of health information.
Nursing Informatics in Health Care Example Paper
McGonigle and Mastrian (2021) define nursing informatics as the nursing subspecialty that enables nurses to master data, information, know-how, and wisdom through subspecialties that combine nursing science with information and computer science (p.56). Information technology has changed nursing care and transformed healthcare practice by assisting care delivery, supplementing decision-making, and predicting future trends in care using data. Technology’s potential to improve patient safety and quality of care is enormous (Schoenbaum & Carroll, 2020).
However, technology keeps advancing, and better methods are being incorporated into practice. However, these technologies still require human interaction and human input to influence patient care. This proposal describes the role of a nurse informaticist, especially in an interdisciplinary team, explains the impact of full nurse engagement in technology, and finally suggests opportunities and predicts challenges that including a nurse informaticist in an interdisciplinary team creates.
Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist
Recent developments in healthcare, including the COVID-19 pandemic, opened our eyes to the need to harness the potential of technology in making healthcare efficient and meeting the needs of many patients remotely. Before this, the National League for Nursing, through their new vision, had urged nursing education programs to teach and prepare them for practice in the era of healthcare technologies (McBride & Tietze, 2022). However, the workload from clinician care needs and care efficiency needs can overwhelm the individual nurses, thus the need for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Nurse informaticists are specialists trained with scientific and artistic knowledge and skills in utilizing data science to influence care through communication, decision-making, and daily monitoring workflow in healthcare systems. Their role is crucial in an interdisciplinary team approach to care because they enable the interdisciplinary teams to work efficiently. Nurse informaticists can influence policymaking and implementation, technical capacity, and patient outcomes.
Nurse informaticists have played an essential role in selecting and implementing appropriate technologies to meet patient care needs in various hospitals. Enhancing technology usability by matching user needs and vendor software features is another way nurse informaticists have ensured that organizations get worth for their expenditures on technologies and that patients have received safe care by using appropriate, safe, and high-yield technologies.
Nurse Informaticists and Other Health Care Organizations
Various institutions have implemented the informaticist role in the clinical and administrative care hierarchies. Nurse informaticists support other nurses, healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders by enabling information structures, processes, and technologies. According to McBride and Tietze (2022), nurse informaticists have improved patient safety and reduced care-associated costs (P.10). The achievements of these outcomes have been possible through safe medication administration systems using technology, predicting patient care changes through the prediction of patterns of previous outcomes, and easy documentation, retrieval and access of patient records.
Nursing Education for the Healthcare Informatics (NEHI) developed a model in 2013 through which nurse informaticists interact with other providers and care processes to achieve desired outcomes. According to the NEHI model, nurse informaticists influence public policy formation and the healthcare delivery environment by improving point-of-care technology, patient safety and care quality, and data management (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2021). Therefore, these nurses bridge the clinical and technological care delivery to meet efficiency and safety needs. Nurse informaticists in an interdisciplinary team initiate communication and champion communication technologies to facilitate team activities.
Informaticists also ensure that the team gets access to a high-quality electronic source of health information that would influence evidence-based decision-making. More importantly, they safeguard the security and privacy of patients’ protected health information (PHI) (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2021). Nurse informaticists ensure that members of the interdisciplinary team use technologies and patient information in a well-coordinated manner so that interruptions and distractions do not breach care continuity and give more room for medical and medication errors. Nurse informaticists ensure that uniform technology use empowers members to maintain patient safety and meaningful use by developing protocols and procedures for using these technologies.
Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology
Patient Care
Engaging nurses in healthcare technology impacts patient care, workflow, and costs. Evidence-based practice is the current nursing care paradigm shift. Practice guidelines and decision-making require clinical evidence to improve patient safety and quality of care. Fully engaging nurses in health care technology will enable them to stay abreast of the current practice guidelines and information for decision-making. Healthcare technologies will enable nurses to access evidence-based information from online databases and also enable them to analyze future outcomes of practice using current and past data and information. Therefore, patient care outcomes result from safe and current evidence-based practices.
Protected Health Information
Protected health information (PHI) can be used to identify patients; inappropriate handling of this information can lead to a breach of patient privacy, confidentiality, and data security. As aforementioned, nurse informaticists enable communication between interdisciplinary team members to ensure successful care coordination. However, coordination requires collecting and sharing patient information that includes PHI.
Nurse informaticists ensure that this information is protected by implementing access controls such as ensuring secure communication in the team and regularly assessing and emulating system communication methods to ensure that PHI privacy and security are not breached (Lindley et al., 2020). In-service staff session updates ensure that nursing staff and other healthcare professionals’ knowledge and information skills are up-to-date with PHI privacy rules and guidelines (Park & Jeong, 2021). This increases professionalism that increases awareness levels.
Workflow
Nurse engagement in healthcare technology improves workflow by enhancing care flexibility, improving care efficiency, and facilitating collaboration. Nurses can deliver care remotely to their patients by using technology. Additionally, they can deliver care in a shorter time when they use technology to care interventions and prevent errors. Finally, nurses’ full engagement in technology enables them to collaborate with other care professionals through effective communication.
Costs and Return on Investment
As aforementioned, fully engaging nurses in healthcare technology improves car efficiency. Efficiency improvement reduces the work input required to achieve care outcomes. However, the costs of the initial implementation strategies will increase due to the costs of purchasing these technologies and training nurses on how to use them. When used efficiently and successfully, technologies could improve patient safety, costs, and quality outcomes.
Opportunities and Challenges
Adding a nurse informaticist’s role would improve care efficiency by improving technology uptake and use among team members. This technology would enhance interdisciplinary collaboration to improve workflow and team outcomes, such as work efficiencies. Therefore, adding a nurse informaticist role would generally improve care delivery in the interdisciplinary approach. However, adding a nurse informaticist role would change the workflow in the healthcare organization because they would take up some roles of current work.
Role overlap can lead to conflicts that would deter successful collaboration. Therefore, team planning and nursing leadership would be required to ensure successful collaboration in the team. Team communication and regular monitoring of team outcomes would improve collaboration. Team decision-making could ensure that every member owns the outcomes of the team activities.
Summary of Recommendations
This proposal has analyzed the benefits and shortcomings of adding a nurse informaticist role into the organization’s workforce structure. These are the four key takeaways from the proposal about the nurse informaticist role. Nursing informatics is a field that combines nursing science with information and computer science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice.
The role of the nurse informaticist is to support the use of technology in nursing practice and facilitate the integration of technology into the daily work of nurses and other healthcare providers. Fully engaging nurses in health care technology can positively impact patient care, including improved patient outcomes, reduced errors, and increased patient satisfaction. Adding a nurse informaticist role to an interdisciplinary team can bring both opportunities and challenges, including initial costs, changes to workflow, and resistance to change.
However, with careful planning and support, these challenges can be overcome, and the use of technology can ultimately lead to improved patient care and better patient outcomes. Nurse informaticists can play a crucial role in improving the usability and effectiveness of healthcare technology by matching user needs and vendor software features and by influencing the selection and implementation of appropriate technologies. This can ensure that this organization gets value for its investments in technology and that patients receive safe, high-quality care.
NRS 450 Nursing Informatics Assignment References
Lindley, L. C., Svynarenko, R., & Profant, T. L. (2020). Data infrastructure for sensitive data: Nursing’s role in the development of a secure research enclave. Computers, Informatics, Nursing: CIN, 38(9), 427–430. https://doi.org/10.1097/CIN.0000000000000677
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2022). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse: Patient safety, quality, outcomes, and interprofessionalism. Springer Publishing.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2021). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett.
Park, H.-K., & Jeong, Y.-W. (2021). Impact of nursing professionalism on the perception of patient privacy protection in nursing students: Mediating effect of nursing informatics competency. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 9(10), 1364. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9101364
Schoenbaum, A. E., & Carroll, W. M. (2020, September 30). Nursing Informatics Key Role in Defining Clinical Workflow, Increasing Efficiency and Improving Quality. HIMSS. https://www.himss.org/resources/nursing-informatics-key-role-defining-clinical-workflow-increasing-efficiency-and
Nursing Informatics in Healthcare Example
The healthcare technology field is considerably dynamic, and technological advancement has made it change at a very high speed. Healthcare institutions continue to adapt healthcare technology from administrative and clinical information systems to promote healthcare service delivery, improve patient safety and outcomes, and reduce costs. Consequently, the need for healthcare informatics skills and knowledge in these institutions has increased. This proposal justifies the need for introducing a nurse informaticist role in the organization. The proposal will entail an exploration of nursing informatics, the nurse informaticist, the impact of full nurse engagement in healthcare technology, and the opportunities and challenges to the nurses and the Interprofessional team with the introduction of the new role.
Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist
According to the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) (n.d.), nursing informatics is the science and practice specialty that combines computer, nursing and information technology sciences to enhance the management and communication of information, knowledge, and data in nursing practice. Nursing informatics is a subset of healthcare informatics as a field that integrates healthcare and information technology, which is specific to integrating information technology into nursing practice. The nursing informatics field mainly assists healthcare institutions in applying healthcare technology by bridging the technical and clinical perspectives gap to maintain patient safety and improve care.
The nurse informaticist is a specialist that works with the healthcare institution’s stakeholders across the care continuum to link nursing science and information technology. The specialist not only works with the nurses and the Information Technology specialists but also collaborates with other healthcare providers in the interprofessional team to promote patient safety and care outcomes while applying healthcare technology at the bedside and organizational levels. Strudwick et al. (2019) note that the nurse informaticist must have robust technical and nursing skills, alongside data analysis, leadership, project management and interpersonal skills to play the specialty role effectively.
Nursing Informaticists and Other Healthcare Organizations
Many healthcare organizations have adopted the nurse informaticist role following the advancement of healthcare technology and the increased need for nursing informatics expertise. These healthcare organizations enjoy the benefits of having this active role since it is easier for them to adapt new healthcare technology applications, devices and systems, implement related policies and analyze and manage healthcare data to inform practice. In addition, organizations with nurse informaticists have improved patient safety and care outcomes since the nurse informaticist’s main aim is to ensure patient safety while using healthcare technology. The organizations also have easier management processes and structures since the nurse informaticist works with the administrators to implement and use administrative information systems.
Nurse Informaticists interact with the rest of the nursing staff and other interprofessional team members by working with them daily. They collaborate with nursing staff to gain and develop feedback on using healthcare technology at the bedside level. The feedback is used to improve healthcare technology, thus improving the quality of patient care. According to Vos et al. (2020), nurse informaticists collaborate with physicians, pharmacists and other medical specialists in the interprofessional team to ensure that healthcare technology, such as electronic health records, are used appropriately to ensure optimum patient care quality. For example, the nurse informaticist works with the doctors to ensure that electronic patient files are accurate, thus avoiding related mistakes such as patient misidentification, which would negatively impact patient care quality. Effective collaboration of the nurse informaticist with other nursing staff and medical specialists in the interprofessional team is facilitated by constant communication, openness, and respect for each specialist’s contribution to the team.
Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Healthcare Technology
Full engagement of nurses in healthcare technology begins with introducing the role of a nursing informaticist in the organization. The engagement positively impacts patient care by providing a platform whereby nurses can give feedback on the healthcare technology used in patient care at the bedside level. The feedback helps improve these technological applications, systems, and devices, thus providing potential for better patient care. HIMSS (n.d.) notes that nurses can utilize EHR, online portal systems, and patient monitoring devices through nursing informatics to facilitate care services, thus improving overall patient care.
Additionally, the nurse informaticist and other interdisciplinary team members are expected to manage patients’ protected health information by safeguarding privacy, security and confidentiality. According to Chen et al. (2019), managing patients’ protected information is the responsibility of every interdisciplinary team member, who are expected to maintain the set policies and safeguards of the institution. The interdisciplinary team and the nurse informaticist can use evidence-based practices to manage patients’ protected health information, including technical, physical, and administrative safeguards (Chen et al., 2019).
Technical safeguards include installing antitheft software, firewalls, and encryption of patient information. The physical safeguards include protecting the specific physical setting where technology stores the information, using access control locks and alarms. Administrative safeguards include developing institutional policies regarding the protection of patient information. Other practices include using strong passwords, biometric identification, and login out of computers to prevent unauthorized access to patient information (Healthit.gov, n.d.).
Nurse engagement in technology reduces the cost of care and increases the return on investment for the organization. The HIMSS (n.d.) notes that nurse informaticists have a deep understanding of medical economics. The understanding helps the nurse informaticist to advise the organizational administrators and stakeholders on the healthcare technology they should invest in to maximize return on investments and, at the same time, reduce the cost of care. In addition, engaging nurses in healthcare technology enables them to design processes that make workflow more efficient.
Opportunities and Challenges
Adding the new nurse informaticist role in the institution will have different challenges and opportunities for nurses and the interprofessional team. The opportunities include having technical assistance provided by the nurse informaticist to the nurses and the interprofessional team at any time needed since the nurse informaticist has technical experience in healthcare technology. Additionally, the adoption and application of new healthcare technology will be made easier due to the prior training and guidance offered by the nurse informaticist.
However, their introduction of the nurse informaticist role may bring different challenges to the interprofessional team. According to Peltonen et al. (2019), the nurse informaticist may bring power and authority issues within the team, thus leading to a loss of respect among team members. For instance, the nurses and the nurse informaticist may have role, power, or expertise conflicts, posing a major challenge to the functionality of the interprofessional team. Differences in the understanding of different issues in nursing or technology may also complicate the interaction of the nurse informaticist and the interprofessional team.
Summary of Recommendations
Introducing the nurse informaticist role in the organization will benefit patient care quality, return on investments, workflow, and managing patients’ protected health information by increasing the efficiency of care services (Chen et al., 2019; Strudwick et al., 2019). The nurse informaticist will also play a major role in linking information technology knowledge and nursing practice. In addition, the new role will enhance nurses’ engagement in healthcare technology, positively impacting patient care and organizational performance. The nurse informaticist will also collaborate with nurses and the other members of the interdisciplinary team to promote care efficiency. Therefore, it is vital to introduce the nurse informaticist’s role in the organization.
References
Chen, Y., Ding, S., Xu, Z., Zheng, H., & Yang, S. (2019). Blockchain-based medical records secure storage and medical service framework. Journal of Medical Systems, 43, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1121-4
Peltonen, L. M., Nibber, R., Lewis, A., Block, L., Pruinelli, L., Topaz, M., Perezmitre, E. L., & Ronquillo, C. (2019). Emerging Professionals’ Observations of Opportunities and Challenges in Nursing Informatics. Nursing leadership (Toronto, Ont.), 32(2), 8–18. https://doi.org/10.12927/cjnl.2019.25965
Strudwick, G., Nagle, L., Kassam, I., Pahwa, M., & Sequeira, L. (2019). Informatics Competencies for Nurse Leaders: A Scoping Review. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 49(6), 323–330. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000760
The Health Information and Management Systems Society. (n.d.) What is Nursing Informatics? Accessed 12th June 2023 from https://www.himss.org/resources/what-nursing-informatics
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (Healthit.gov). (n.d.). Guide to Privacy and Security of Health Information. Accessed 12th June 2023 https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/privacy/onc_privacy_and_security_chapter4_v1_022112.pdf
Vos, J. F., Boonstra, A., Kooistra, A., Seelen, M., & van Offenbeek, M. (2020). The influence of electronic health record use on collaboration among medical specialties. BMC Health Services Research, 20(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05542-6
