Nursing Informatics
Read the NAQ article that was posted in the lesson. Knowing what you know from the chapters in this unit (Chapters 10 through 13), discuss the recommendations presented in the article for the Ideal system:
Simple, fast documentation with minimal redundancy
EHR coordination with patient and family needs and wishes
Central source of best-practice forms and other resources in a free, vendor-neutral, and accessible library
Multidisciplinary collaboration on the design of EHR and CDS systems
Data: Standardized, actionable, and interoperable
Integration of biomedical devices with the EHR to avoid nurses entering that data
Multiple sources of decision support information for clinicians
Decision support dashboards
Discuss how these recommendations (re: nursing informatics) would affect nursing workflow and meaningful use. Pick and choose some of the ideas from the article and apply them to workflow analysis, system design, and meaningful use concepts from Chapter 14.
Sample Answer
Nursing Informatics
Nursing informatics is essential in healthcare. It is the science and practice of integrating nursing information and knowledge with technology to assimilate and manage health information. The main goal of nursing informatics is to expand health of individuals and communities while minimizing costs. Nurses appreciate that meaningful use of health Information Technology, together with best evidence-based care and practice, has expanded healthcare and health for everyone. These improvements have gone far to improving the health results and minimizing the duplication of effort, therefore streamlining the nursing workflow and reducing cost.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) for instance, as an essential part of nursing informatics, can positively impact nursing workflow meaningful use in healthcare (Rathert et al. 2019). EHR facilitates the use of vendor-supplied data that has been recovered from their clients’ systems. It also increases the delivery of guidelines-based care, improves the capacity to complete monitoring and surveillance for disease condition and reduces medication errors. Besides, the clinician interacts with interface terminology whenever verifying diagnoses and the procedures in the patient’s electronic record. The care providers can perform searches using the search functionality in EHRs designated locations, which returns the terms to the provider to pick the suitable procedure or problem. Through EHRs meaningful use, it aids in outlining how the clinical based patient data must be exchanged between the care providers, insurers and providers and between the patients and providers.
As it has been outlined in the article, EHRs simple, fast documentation with minimal redundancy helps in the workflow analysis where timely health information and patient data essential is provided to make comprehensive clinical decisions, counting demographics, nursing and medical diagnoses, allergies, medication lists and assessment results (O’Brien et al. 2015).
In system design, EHRs standardized, actionable and interoperable data helps in solving solutions across organizations, significantly reducing the costs and complication of the IT infrastructure by creating complete EHR importance between the providers. This shared visibility eliminates the need to contribute to Health Information Exchange or invest in the solutions to integrate the data across diverse EHR platforms. Interoperable EHRs allows electronic sharing of the patient information between diverse EHR systems and care providers, refining ease with providers deliver care to the patients. EHRs standardization enables complete, precise documentation in events of legal subjects or questions concerning the quality of care or observance to the policies during the patient’s hospitalization.
There is the integration of the biomedical devices with EHR to avoid the nurses accessing patient’s data. This has facilitated meaningful use where the clinical patient data is carefully exchanged between the healthcare providers, insurers and providers and between the patients and providers. The electronic communication and connectivity, in this case, includes online communication between care partners and patients, healthcare team members, counting Web messaging, email and unified health record in and across the settings, organizations, and telemedicine. This factor has been extended to include interoperability and interfaces essential to exchange the health information with the rest of providers, patients, laboratories and pharmacies.
References
- O’Brien, A., Weaver, C., Settergren, T., Hook, M. L., & Ivory, C. H. (2015). EHR documentation: the hype and the hope for improving nursing satisfaction and quality outcomes (PDF). Nursing Administration Quarterly, 39(4), 333–339. Retrieved from http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/29316/293166203.pdf
- Rathert, C., Porter, T. H., Mittler, J. N., & Fleig-Palmer, M. (2019). Seven years after Meaningful Use: Physicians’ and nurses’ experiences with electronic health records. Health care management review, 44(1), 30-40. Retrieved from https://journals.lww.com/hcmrjournal/Abstract/2019/01000/Seven_years_after_Meaningful_Use__Physicians__and.5.aspx
