Evidence-based Proposal to Support Need for a Nurse Informaticist in an Organization

Nursing Informatics in Health Care Assignment Instructions

Write a 4-5 page evidence-based proposal to support the need for a nurse informaticist in an organization who would focus on improving health care outcomes.

Introduction

Nurses at the baccalaureate level in all practice areas are involved in nursing informatics through interaction with information management and patient care technologies. Nurses must not only demonstrate knowledge of and skills in health information and patient care technologies, but also how to use these tools at the bedside and organizational levels. Moreover, nurses need to recognize how information gathered from various health information sources can impact decision making at the national and state regulatory levels.

Demonstration of Proficiency

By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the course competencies through the following assessment scoring guide criteria:

Describe nurses’ and the interdisciplinary team’s role in informatics with a focus on electronic health information and patient care technology to support decision making.
- Define nursing informatics and the role of the nurse informaticist.
- Explain how the nurse collaborates with the interdisciplinary team, including technologists, to improve the quality of patient care.
- Justify the need for a nurse informaticist in a health care organization.
Implement evidence-based strategies to effectively manage protected health information.
- Explain evidence-based strategies that the nurse and interdisciplinary team can use to effectively manage patients’ protected health information (privacy, security, and confidentiality).
Apply professional, scholarly communication to facilitate use of health information and patient care technologies.

For this assessment, assume you are a nurse attending a meeting of your state’s nurses’ association. A nurse informaticist conducted a presentation on her role and its impact on positive patient and organizational outcomes in her workplace. You realize that your organization is undergoing many technological changes. You believe this type of role could provide many benefits to your organization.

You decide to pursue proposing a nurse informaticist role in your organization. You speak to your chief nursing officer (CNO) and human resources (HR) manager. These individuals ask you to prepare a 4–5 page evidence-based proposal to support the new role. In this way, they can make an informed decision as to whether the addition of such a role could justify the return on investment (ROI). They need your proposal before an upcoming fiscal meeting.

An Evidence-based Proposal to Support Need for a Nurse Informaticist in an Organization

Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist

Nursing informatics refers to a nursing field that integrates information science, computer science, and nursing science to communicate and manage data, wisdom, information, and knowledge in nursing practice. Nursing informatics is a developing field that focuses on strengthening nurses’ skills in clinical decision-making as they face ever-challenging and changing practice situations. Nursing informatics will enhance nursing practice in new technology by enhancing swift access to patient information, reduction in possible errors and enhancement of general efficiency (Andrea, 2014).

Nurse informaticist is a nurse specialist in nursing informatics. The role of this nurse is to work with a computer system and patient data. Different from healthcare informatics that centers excessively on administrative problems, nursing informatics is committed to patient care. The majority of nurse informaticists operate as a communication point between the IT staff and clinical nurses. Nurse informaticists give feedback on new technology and system directly from users. They can, in addition, be responsible for systems development, quality control, and clinical staff training (All Nursing Schools, 2019).

Nurse Informaticists and Other Health Care Organization Staffs

Nursing informaticists play a great role in enhancing the effective use of information technology in health care organizations to enhance high performance. Nursing informaticists play a great role in health care promotion by enhancing the application of information technology in all nursing aspects which include research, clinical areas, education, and management. They enhance the use of information systems to gather patient data and support decision making in line with patient care. Informaticists help health care organizations to improve their performance efficiency by ensuring that patient data is stored in an electronic system, and can be accurately retrieved at the point of care.

This helps in ensuring a high level of accuracy in patient identification, elimination of errors in various activities such as provision of medication, and enhances dissemination of any kind of information needed by physicians or nurses at the point of care to enhance the quality of care offered to a patient. Informatics has thus played a great role not just in enhancing nursing efficiency, but also in promoting nursing research by helping nurse researchers in obtaining needed information to build their knowledge and to facilitate their research process. They have also played a great role in training other staff in a health care setting on how to use different technologies in health care organizations. By so doing, informaticists ensure the effective use of health care technology in a health care organization to enhance care efficiency and high performance (Staccini & Lau, 2018).

The Nurse informaticists interact with the rest of the nursing staff and the interdisciplinary team in various ways. Nurse informaticists play a great role in training nursing staff and other staff from other health care disciplines on how to use new technologies in the health care organization. Nurse informaticists also ensure that other nurses understand how they can employ different available information systems in the organization to improve their work efficiency and performance. This training promotes nursing staff and other medics’ ability to use available health care information to make decisions, to improve care quality, to avoid errors and to promote general efficiency during their operations. Nursing informaticists also help in systems development and maintenance and hence they can interact with the rest of the workforce while trying to fix a system error identified by others during their operation, explain a system operational feature to other staffs or while helping them to retrieve information they could not manage on their own. Nursing informaticists can also interact with other nurses while helping them to gather relevant health care information they can use to facilitate their nursing research, including evidence-based research, or while discussing with them on requirements to a new system intending to be developed to aid them in their daily nursing or health care operations (Hannah, 2015).

Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology

Full engagement of nurses in health care technology ensures that nurses understand healthcare technology, how they work and how they can be effectively used to enhance the quality of care. With total commitment to healthcare technology, a nurse can manage not just to use the technology but also to advance it to solve localized problems. Full engagement with health care technology makes it easy to integrate the technology during patient care with a high level of accuracy. This improves nurses’ to accurately retrieve patient data and use them to enhance patient care. Effective use of technology can also assist in making relations and deductions regarding patient health, enhancing nurses’ ability to make a decision on the best care approach for the patient (Hannah, 2015).

Full engagement in health care technology helps a nurse to understand or even security threats associated with those techniques. By so doing, a nurse gets to investigate available security measures, and what can work best to protect the health care technological system. A nurse also gets to embrace system security routines that include developing a strong password and changing frequently, not sharing a password, logging out personal accounts after use or when leaving the work station among other things. A nurse also gets to learn more about enacted laws to protect patient’s data privacy and to ensure a high level of patient data confidentiality and to ensure these laws are fully observed (Kobayashi, Kane & Paton, 2018).

Full engagement of nurses in health care technology is likely to increase efficiency, reduce the time of care, eliminate errors and enhance patient outcomes. This will definitely attract more customers to a health care facility, enhancing the organization’s income. High efficiency will reduce the cost of care, enhancing the high level of saving in the organization. All these will result in a high return on investment.

Opportunities and Challenges

Working with health care technologies help nurses to identify opportunities that they can take advantage of to enhance performance. For instance, with these technologies, it is considerably easy for nurses to use patient data to make an analysis of the patient’s health and decide on the next move to take to improve positive outcomes. Technology also makes it easy to identify serious medical issues affecting the community, to analyze their trends, to identify the cause and to define the best solution. Technology eases the process of doing research, gathering nursing care information, and selecting the best evidence-based practice to enhance patient care. This means that a nurse can advance their knowledge and professional goals without a lot of struggle, especially when assisted by nurses’ informaticists (Hannah, 2015). Exposure to technology subject nurses to various challenges that include system security issues, need to advance individual knowledge on new technologies to be able to utilize the technology effectively, need to carefully consider patients data privacy and confidentiality, and possibility of system errors which can negatively influence the care process or skew individual decision making (Kobayashi, Kane & Paton, 2018).

Summary of Recommendation

Nursing informatics plays an important role in enhancing the use of health care technology during nursing and health care operations. Nurse informaticists help other nurses and medical professionals on how to effectively use health care technology to enhance efficiency, to eliminate error, to cut operation cost, to improve on safety, and to improve patient outcome and organization general performance. They also assist in identifying systems errors and eliminating them, ensuring system security and preventing electronic breach of data patients’ privacy and confidentiality. Nursing informatics can also enhance research development in an organization, promoting the identification of evidence-based practice for various nursing cases. Nursing informatics is thus an important field in any health care organization that intends to use technology to enhance care. It does not only ensure effective utilization of technology to enhance performance but also guarantees to do so without experiencing serious problems such as a security breach or breach of patients’ data privacy and confidentiality.

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