Assessment 01: Nursing Informatics in Healthcare
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NURS-FPX 4040
Nursing Informatics in Healthcare
Nursing informatics is a specialization of nursing, computer and information science that aims at enhancing the delivery of health care via the efficient use of data and technology. The nurse informaticist is centrally involved in the process of supporting systems, such as Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) and Electronic Health Records (EHR), to improve patient safety and decision-making. The proposal outlines the importance of hiring a nurse informaticist highlighting the ways the position will help enhance the healthcare organization’s flow, the quality of patient care, and ensure compliance with privacy laws. This role can use technology to improve operations and promote the use of evidence-based practice (Forman et al., 2020). This position is justified due to its successful implementation in other healthcare organizations.
Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist
Nursing informatics is the specialty that integrates nursing, computer, and information sciences to manage data and information in healthcare processes. The main goal is to improve the quality of patient care. This is achieved by guaranteeing that healthcare professionals can efficiently access and utilize accurate information for clinical decision-making. Nursing informatics is a specialized area that aims to use EHR, CDSS and other healthcare IT systems to enhance patient care and health delivery systems (Papadopoulos et al., 2022). The nurse informaticist plays an important role in this field, serving as a bridge between clinical care and technology. Their responsibilities include implementing, managing, and optimizing health information systems to meet the needs of healthcare providers and patients.
Nurses make sure that the healthcare delivery systems are developed for patient safety, and productivity, and to align with evidence-based practice. Nurse informaticists play an active role in advancing patient safety through the creation of tools like CDSS (Olakotan & Yusof, 2021). The tools assist in minimizing diagnostic errors, identifying possible drug interactions and presenting clinical alerts in real-time. Moreover, nurse informaticists play a central role in training and supporting healthcare teams in using these systems effectively (Zareshahi et al., 2022). According to Dang et al. (2021), nursing informatics is necessary for obtaining patient-centered care and supporting healthcare professionals in delivering efficient, high-quality care. The use of CDSS, for instance, has shown important improvements in patient outcomes by providing clinicians with timely, relevant information at the point of care (Laing & Mercer, 2021). The growing reliance on data-driven decision-making in healthcare makes the role of nurse informaticists critical to modern healthcare organizations.
Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology
Nursing engagement in healthcare technology has the potential to drastically change patient care, protected health information, workflow, and costs. When nurses are optimally utilizing systems such as the CDSS and the EHRs, they are able to obtain real time patient information leading to better patient care. The results in fewer mistakes, prompt and efficient interventions, and quality patient care. As for protected health information (PHI), nurse informatics together with the interdisciplinary team of the healthcare team take full responsibility for the safeguarding of privacy and confidentiality of the data. Evidence-based strategies, such as encryption of patient data, role-based access control, and data anonymization are employed to protect patient data (Barka et al., 2022). The patient care systems prevent unauthorized access and breach of the systems, thus conforming to healthcare privacy acts such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (Shojaei et al., 2024).
From a workflow perspective, incorporating the nurses with health information technology enhances the clinical procedures and minimizes the time consumed on paperwork. It also improves practice communication among the interdisciplinary team. Technology such as EHRs helps in the easy and fast access to patient records and documentation this helps in faster work and less pressure on the health professionals. From the cost and return on investment (ROI) point of view, achieving full involvement of the nurses with health technology enables cost efficiencies by decreasing errors, fewer readmissions, and efficient use of resources available (Thusini et al., 2022). While implementing such systems as CDSS and EHR requires an initial investment. The systems increase operational effectiveness and better patient outcomes could result in overall positive ROI for the healthcare organization.
Opportunities and Challenges
The integration of the nurse informaticist role presents many opportunities for nurses and the interdisciplinary team. There are several key opportunities which include better quality clinical decisions through the use of data. Nurse informaticists can use applications such as CDSS that give notifications that can assist in the diagnosis of a disease and eventually enhance patients’ health (Wu et al., 2020). These systems can also improve efficiency because the administrative tasks that are involved can be automated and can free up time for clinicians to focus on patient care. Another opportunity is education and training where nurse informaticists can serve as intermediaries between technology and clinicians. They help to ensure that nurses and other healthcare providers are adequately trained on new systems, which in turn improves the chances of positive adoption of healthcare technology and boosts its efficiency. Moreover, nurse informatics provides assistance to the organization in maintaining health information security and patient confidentiality, which ultimately results in a safer healthcare system.
However, there are challenges regarding the implementation of this role. The critical challenge is the resistance to change as some of the staff may be threatened by the new technologies. The need to learn how to use them, as well as the fear that their skills may be reduced to operating the technology. Other issues include the interoperability of multiple health information systems which is a technical concern that the nurse informatics needs to address (Miandoab et al., 2023). Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary team can collaborate and work together to improve care outcomes through communication and problem solving. The goals of using technology are shared and include, for example, decreasing medical mistakes and improving patient outcomes. The team should be able to implement healthcare technology more effectively into their workflow and, thus, provide better quality of care.
Summary of Recommendations
The role of a nurse informaticist is important in increasing patient safety and overall care through the utilization of CDSS and EHRs which gives timely information that is useful in clinical decision making. The role also improves the health system productivity by minimizing the manual work done in the healthcare facilities hence enabling the healthcare providers to attend to the patients adequately. Additionally, the nurse informaticist guarantees compliance with privacy and security regulations, safeguarding protected health information. Evidence from other healthcare settings shows that the integration of this role leads to decreased diagnostic mistakes and increased patient outcomes (Meyer et al., 2021). Hence, the utilization of a nurse informaticist is much more than improving patients’ care and reducing risks of errors, it is a worthy investment that would result in the improvement of operational processes.
Conclusion
The addition of a nurse informatics specialist for our organization is a wise decision that will increase patient safety, optimize work processes, and optimize the use of information technology. The integration of systems such as CDSS and EHR will be coordinated by the nurse informaticist and this will enhance better clinical decision making and data privacy compliance. The role’s success in other organizations provides strong evidence that it will yield important benefits, both in terms of patient outcomes and operational efficiency.
References
Barka, E., Al Baqari, M., Kerrache, C. A., & Herrera-Tapia, J. (2022). Implementation of a biometric-based blockchain system for preserving privacy, security, and access control in healthcare records. Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks, 11(4), 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan11040085
Dang, T. H., Nguyen, T. A., Hoang Van, M., Santin, O., Tran, O. M. T., & Schofield, P. (2021). Patient-centred care: Transforming the health care system in Vietnam with support of digital health technology. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(6), e24601. https://doi.org/10.2196/24601
Forman, T. M., Armor, D. A., & Miller, A. S. (2020). A review of clinical informatics competencies in nursing to inform best practices in education and nurse faculty development. Nursing Education Perspectives, 41(1), 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.nep.0000000000000588
Laing, S., & Mercer, J. (2021). Improved preventive care clinical decision-making efficiency: leveraging a point-of-care clinical decision support system. BioMed Central Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01675-8
Meyer, A. N. D., Giardina, T. D., Khawaja, L., & Singh, H. (2021). Patient and clinician experiences of uncertainty in the diagnostic process: Current understanding and future directions. Patient Education and Counseling, 104(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2021.07.028
Miandoab, A. T., Samad-Soltani, T., Jodati, A., & Rezaei-Hachesu, P. (2023). Interoperability of heterogeneous health information systems: A systematic literature review. BioMed Central Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-023-02115-5
Olakotan, O. O., & Yusof, M. (2021). The appropriateness of clinical decision support systems alerts in supporting clinical workflows: A systematic review. Health Informatics Journal, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/14604582211007536
Papadopoulos, P., Soflano, M., Chaudy, Y., Adejo, W., & Connolly, T. M. (2022). A systematic review of technologies and standards used in the development of rule-based clinical decision support systems. Health and Technology, 12(4), 713–727. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-022-00672-9
Shojaei, P., Gjorgievska, E. V., & Chow, Y.-W. (2024). Security and privacy of technologies in health information systems: A systematic literature review. Computers, 13(2), 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers13020041
Thusini, S., Milenova, M., Nahabedian, N., Grey, B., Soukup, T., Chua, K.-C., & Henderson, C. (2022). The development of the concept of return-on-investment from large-scale quality improvement programs in healthcare: An integrative systematic literature review. BioMed Central Health Services Research, 22(1). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9728007/
Wu, M.-Z., Pan, H.-Y., & Wang, Z. (2020). Nursing decision support system: application in electronic health records. Frontiers of Nursing, 7(3), 185–190. https://doi.org/10.2478/fon-2020-0027
Zareshahi, M., Mirzaei, S., & Nasiriani, K. (2022). Nursing informatics competencies in critical care unit. Health Informatics Journal, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/14604582221083843
Zhai, Y., Yu, Z., Zhang, Q., Qin, W., Yang, C., & Zhang, Y. (2022). Transition to a new nursing information system embedded with clinical decision support: A mixed-method study using the hot-fit framework. BioMed Central Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-02041-y
