How Informatics Affect the Clinical Nursing Practice

How Informatics Affect the Clinical Nursing Practice

Computers have played an important role in every profession including nursing. Information technology is widely used by different hospitals worldwide to strengthen the quality that was given to the patients. Hence, nursing informatics has emerged in the past and continues to boom and being used by the medical practitioners nowadays.

Nursing Informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information and knowledge in nursing practice. It facilitates the integration of data, information and knowledge to support patients, nurses and other providers in their decision making in all roles and settings.

This support is accomplished through the use of information structures, information processes and information technology. (ANA, 2001, p. 17)

It is anticipated that majority of nurses who will enter the profession will be computer literate by the year 2010. In addition, it is also anticipated that every health care setting will employ at least one Nurse Informatics specialist and will implement some type of a Clinical Information System.

It is designed to support clinical nursing practice. It requires not only an understanding of professional nursing but also technology that is the application of science to function electronically. [1]

Nursing practice has evolved and changed radically. It has become an integral part of the Electronic Health Record. Computer systems with nursing and patient care data, nursing care plans were integrated into one interdisciplinary patient health record in the Electronic Health Record.

Continued advancement of information and technology and its application to the nursing practice plays an important role and greatly affect each nurse especially those registered nurses who are more experienced, that is why this term paper seeks to present and discuss the role of informatics in clinical nursing practice. More specifically, it answers the following:

1.      What are the nursing tasks and responsibilities that will apply to the use of computer technology that will contribute to good clinical governance?

2.      How can the nurses further involve themselves both in the use of technology and decision making process in regards to the evaluation and selection of applications in the computer software and hardware?

3.      What are the strategies that can be used to bridge the age and digital experience gap between participating nurses and the influx of the next generation new graduates that apply to informatics application?

This particular topic needs a great deal of general description method. In the process, it can also be helped with the use of review of some studies that is related to the impact of nursing informatics to clinical nursing.

I. Body

The application of Nursing Informatics provides great benefits not only to the patients but to the nurses themselves as well. The health care team especially nurses makes use of Electronic Health Record (HER) in documenting the case of the patient. It is a secure, real time point of care, patient-centric information resource for clinicians. The EHR can include dental and other records concerning a patient. It represents the portions of a patient’s medical record that are stored in a computer system as well the functional benefits derived from having an electronic health record. (HIMSS Analytics, INC, 2007) (Gartee, 2007)

One advantage of an electronic health record is that it can be simultaneously available to everyone who needs to use it. Secondly is that, electronic records necessitate the collection of structured data. The nurse can systematically collect data that can be transformed into information for decision making and can also be used to examine what practices, treatments,