THE FUTURE OF NURSING INFORMATICS

Technology and the effective use of it – is our future. The future of nursing and Nursing Informatics is in alignment with the future of healthcare – growth in the use of technology to ensure safety, positive outcomes and satisfaction of patients. Nursing is at the forefront of this wave of technology innovation.

The Nursing Unit of the Future provides nurses with an opportunity to experience, assess benefits and provide feedback regarding new information technologies prior to implementation house-wide. As the nurses evaluate the clinical efficacy of devices and applications, the Nursing Informatics team also evaluates technical and clinical outcomes criteria including: How devices withstand normal wear and tear, How easily information is gathered and recorded, User friendliness, Clinician satisfaction, Time efficiency versus existing methods, Impact on patient safety, Impact on patient satisfaction, and the Impact on caregiver satisfaction.

         

The future holds rapid and ongoing paradigm shifts for clinical caregivers, especially in the areas of electronic documentation, physician order entry and the collaborative transformation of clinical practice.

Technology holds the promise to eliminate redundancy, aggregate relevant information in easy to access and read formats and improve caregiver efficiency, as it enhances nursing practice and drives improvements in patient quality outcomes. 

 

Factors of Nursing knowledge on Health Care Informatics

    Nursing Informatics is currently a vital topic for nursing, which will gain in importance as it progresses. Some predict that it wills not only be an important core component of all nursing education and practice, but that it will also become a crucial nursing specialty. A nursing informatics specialty integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science in identifying, collecting, processing, and managing data and information to support nursing practice, administration, education, research, and the expansion of nursing knowledge. The rapidly changing health care delivery system is creating a pressing need for nurses with advanced knowledge and skills to provide leadership for reshaping nursing and health care in communities and health care organizations. The informatics nurse specialist serves as a translator between nurse clinicians and computer services personnel (program analysts, programmers, data base managers, hardware/software vendor and others).

Graduates of a certificate program in Nursing Informatics have the knowledge and skills to lead informatics projects in a wide range of clinical, educational, and business settings. Graduates of degree specializations in Nursing Informatics will be the leaders of tomorrow in this quickly growing specialty area of Nursing.

Over the past thirty or so years, the field of nursing informatics has evolved, slowly but surely. Within this evolution, roles and responsibilities for nursing experts have subsequently evolved as well. These roles can be confusing at times, since several names and titles are used to identify similar positions within the informatics field. Some examples include: Nursing informatics Specialist, Chief of Nursing informatics, Director of Nursing Informatics, Clinical Information System Coordinator, Director of Clinical Systems, CIO or Chief Information Officer, and so on. Just as confusing is the diverse way that Nursing Informaticians become educated as experts. From self directed learning through to graduate school study, the means to become educated in these roles is still evolving. As well, nursing informatics roles can exist within all fields of nursing whether practice, administration, research or education. Several initiatives are underway to standardize nursing informatics education and to promote the acceptance of nursing informatics specialists in health care, research, and education.

The Impact When Caring and Technology Meets

 

The impact of  technology is it  touches everyone in their daily life, it's particularly been helpful in our nursing careers. It's difficult to recall our Doctors & other staffs without cell phones, pagers & beepers but once there was a time without the buzz of these bodily attachments. As certainly as those whom came before us thought the telephone was one of the greatest inventions, today cell phones are taking over land lines & medical staffs are afforded more freedom in movement & more easily accessible at a moment's notice & while mobile. The impact of a faster response time allowed by these communication devices to critical care nursing decisions is that it saves time & lives. When time matters most & a life hangs in the balance, smart communication via technology can make all the difference. As facilities incorporate more & more computers into their network, computers at working stations are more accessible to staffs for use.Critical care nursing has benefited in faster communications, faster service, improved standards of care, advanced care devices, improved safety, offered quality improvements, saved many more life's & helped many more patients than once even imaginable.

For me whatever technology brings, you can be certain of changes to our critical care nursing & our practice. Probably no other single factor has opened up new doors, new horizons & brought forth new careers than technology in critical care nursing. Although paper forms will always have a place in our critical care nursing, technology has made a dramatic cut back & will continue to do so as we move forward in this computer & wireless oriented world. Our world may never become disease free but as critical care nursing, we will always do our best to incorporate knowledge, new skills gained through research & data made possible through technology for better patient care. Indeed critical care nursing & technology go hand in hand & the benefits surround us to embrace as educational to stay abreast of new changes coming down the pipes to our critical care nursing careers.