Informatics Reflection

¶ … master's program with SON, I had worked as a nurse in a hospital setting for 16 years. As a manager, I did gain some experience with informatics through patient satisfaction scores. The corporation I work for, HCA, is big on numbers. I would share the patient satisfaction scores with staff because it is a reflection on work performance. The patient satisfaction scores told employees where performance was good and what areas needed a higher focus for higher improvements in our work performance.

After entering the master's program, Healthcare Research and Statistical Analysis was a requirement. This class was very valuable in how the SON helped me to learn. Assignments included how to apply for an IRB application process, literature review, learning how to analyze data, learning how to interpret articles and publications, and completing a research paper that required reading multiple articles and data analysis. Additional learning experience came with the utilization of IBM SPSS Statistics statistical software application.

This helped me to understand the research process, how research can contain strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, how information is interpreted and analyzed, as well as what the information can tell us. The literature review helped me see how there are gaps in research and in healthcare practices that require additional research to enable improvements in how health care is delivered to patients. Data analysis helped me to learn how the information can tell the bigger picture by examining what others have done before us as well as the outcomes.

Learning to interpret articles and publications helped me to see how the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations can enable better study designs in future research to gain more knowledge. Learning the statistical software application, helped me see where time is cut down in the analysis and interpretation processes. The actual statistical figures helped to see more of the reality of the bigger picture and helped in determining findings and how different areas could be improved as well as gaining a deeper understanding of disease processes and how they affect patients.

It helped me understand how the patient satisfaction scores were just a beginning in the informatics world. I don't know of anything the SON could have done better in teaching this class. In learning to become more proficient in the process, I applied the techniques learned in Healthcare Research and Statistical Analysis to assignments in Adult Health I and Women's Health I. These classes required picking a patient and a specific disease process to write case narratives.

By utilizing the research and statistical analysis learned, it helped me to see how the disease process worked in an individual patient and to what point the patient had reached in the disease process at a given period of time. It also helped explain how.