it Nursing Efforts Explored

Building a More Effective Workplace With Information Technology The purpose of this essay is to explain and identify the role of information technology in improving patient care outcomes. This essay will explain why incorporating these types of skills an models can be extremely beneficial for patient outcomes and creating a safe working environment for medical professionals. The medical profession is a very complicated and involved area of work where critical errors can result in endangering patient safety.

Finding aids that can assist the nursing professional in this maintaining an organized and effective workplace are essential in today's day and age where the medical system itself is at risk. Simply put, there are too many errors in managing information and data. McCullough et al. (2014) agreed with this premise when they wrote " the U.S. health care system is often criticized as fragmented and uncoordinated. The consequences of this poorly integrated system are stark, leading to a large number of preventable medical errors and wasteful resource allocation.

The cost of medical errors are famously large with some estimates attributing over 44,000 deaths annually to inpatient hospital errors Faced with a health care system that appears far from optimized many health policy analysts have placed health information technology (IT) at the center of their health care reform initiatives. Recent improvements in health IT and the growth of IT investments in other sectors of the economy suggest that health IT can dramatically improve the practice of medicine.

Technology is merely a tool however, and should not be relied upon as panacea. IT efforts can and will be successful when they are used in conjunction with a proper organizational strategy that funnels and channels the abilities of IT into the right direction. "While it is important to demonstrate the link between technology and improved patient care, it is equally important to contextualize the adoption of technology as an evolutionary process within broader systemic changes.

Technology must be understood as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In the past, other investigators have focused on the implementation of technology as a change agent, typically viewing it as a top-down process initiated by management," (Brown et al., 2005). Patient care technologies are based upon subjective values that derive from the patient themselves. When safeguards and decision making support tools are added to this level of understanding, it becomes clear that IT can have a direct and immediate impact on any professional medical system.

It is necessary to treat IT as a component for nurse managers and their ability to successfully approach their job with a clear motive and one that truly aims to cure pain and suffering and eliminate illness. Information Technology must be aligned with an overall strategy that is directed by leadership. This alignment must provide the necessary guidance for the technology to be used in a proficient manner. Technology itself cannot and most likely will not be able to.