Nursing informatics and patient safety in healthcare

¶ … challenging environment that the world faces has placed much strain and stress on the health care industry and their many institutions. Despite the rapid advances in technology, nutrition and fitness, the world is in constant need of medical treatment and assistance. The role of the nurse and the professional duties that accompany this experience has also changed rapidly along with technology and medical advancement. It is important to investigate how nurses can take advantage of these newly developed systems to perform at a higher level and eventually ease the suffering and pain that accompanies medical procedures in today's day and age.

Informatics is a newly formed discipline that provides some of the solutions to the many problems that nurses are faced with. The purpose of this essay is to discuss and highlight the importance of informatics and its synthesis into the nursing profession. The essay will first give some background information on informatics and its applications before describing the effects this approach can have on both nursing quality and safety. Before concluding this essay will comment on the importance of a successful implementation plan of an informatics-based modification.

Informatics Background

According to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), nursing informatics is "a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice. NI supports consumers, patients, nurses, and other providers in their decision making in all roles and settings." Nursing informatics provides a new approach to nursing by providing more technology with some of the more caring aspects of the profession.

Informatics is essential in providing patient centered care due to the nature of the science. Informatics uses data or information to develop models or ideas that can be applied in many aspects of medicine, including research, clinical care and policy developers. Informatics is an attempt to mechanize the medical system to new levels of efficiency and effectives. Economic aspects are also important in the understanding of informatics as it relates to the costly medical industry by providing solutions through the manipulation of data.

The growth and unfoldment of nursing informatics is becoming more widespread as the benefits are slowly realized. Thede (2012) suggested that "most nursing schools now teach at least one of the threads of informatics. Additionally both the National League for Nursing's and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing's accrediting agencies have added beginning informatics as a curriculum requirement. This is in line with the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) specification that education for the healthcare professions includes content that enables the use of informatics in the clinical area." It appears now that there is enough preliminary information and research to make some distinctions about the efficacy of the science through its impacts on both nursing quality and safety.

Impact on Nursing Safety

Informatics, besides placing much benefit towards the quality of health care also allows for the safety aspects to be improved as well. Safety is important in the medical profession for obvious reasons, but many times nurses can be unnecessarily exposed to risks that can be prevented. Informatics plays a role in keeping people safe through the proper dissemination of data and information. Mistakes are less likely to occur in an informatics system and there is a correlation pattern with increases in health care quality and health care safety.

Nurses are the glue in patient care delivery in hospitals, the clinicians who are there from moment to moment at the patient bedside, supporting the physicians' diagnoses and orders and carrying out numberless critical care giving and patient safety tasks for patients. Indeed, on a moment-to-moment basis, they are usually more aware of the patient safety culture of their hospitals than doctors are. Every tool and piece of technology should be afforded to nurses in their complicated and often challenging job. Informatics provides an avenue to lessen the workload of the nurses so that they may concentrate on other more pertinent aspects of their duties.

On another level, the availability of organized data allows for a much safer environment in general. Bioterrorism and other threats of pandemics and epidemics are always knocking on the doorstep of humanity and the medical profession should have as much preparation in regards to treating those who may be affected by such attacks. The technology that informatics provides useful reference and application to many safety issues besides major terror attacks and disasters as well. A comprehensive informatics plan will reduce the risk of many common dangers within the health care setting including, falls, medication errors, identification errors, suicides, infections, adverse drug effects and treatment delays. It is almost impossible to make a health care setting more dangerous with an increased dedication to informatics and the use of data and information to successfully treat patients and realize healing.

Incorporating Informatics

Incorporating informatics in a health care setting must be tempered with restraint and caution if it is to be expected. The power that this applied technology contains may be too much for many to be exposed to if the right precautions are not taken in accordance with organization strategy. What is most important in implementing an informatics strategy is the alignment with the larger purposes of the organization. Informatics efforts are only viable when they are properly synchronized and aware of the goals, missions and objectives of the smaller sub-units within the larger unit as well.

New personnel may be needed for training, installment and maintenance of computer hardware, so this idea must always be thought of when designing such a plan. A learning curve must also be expected to happen, as it may take time for people to get used to the changes and have them become second nature and fully instilled within the standard operating procedures.

To fully realize a total change towards a balanced informatics-based medical practice may take some time and effort from all aspects of society. Educational institutions need to continue to promote this science and continue to conduct research that may serve these ends in a productive manner. Older and more experienced medical professionals may need to become more flexible in their attitudes as well in order to realize the full benefit of this technology.