Health Information Technology has significant impacts on nursing policy and practice including the role of these professionals in patient education. Actually, the Information Technology development process in healthcare is based on the nurses' ability to understand the community and provide distinctive insights about patient education among other factors (Effken & Abbott, 2009). Since nurses are important elements of the healthcare system, they are critical in ensuring that the confidence of patients in the health providers is maintained even as technology mediates interactions.

The main impact of the emergence of Health Information Technology on the role of a nurse in patient education is that technology mediates interactions between patients and their care providers. As a result, nurses are required to ensure that the role technology plays in mediating these interactions does not affect the insights provided in the process or the delivery of improved patient care. Moreover, through Health Information Technology, nurses' role in patient education involves the coordination of the patient's care needs and helping these clients to navigate the heath care system. This helps the nurses to assume proactive nursing leadership in patient education that focuses on eliminating the barriers that may hinder the delivery of primary care to patients.

The fourth trend with impact on the nurses' role in patient education is the ever-increasing complexity of patient care. The complexity of patient care is evident in the fact that there are more acutely ill patients across various health care facilities. Actually, the number of beds in specialty and critical care areas is similar to the number of general use beds. The complexity of the needed patient care has been enhanced or worsened by the increase in the number, length, and severity of chronic illnesses due to the increase in the length of life expectancy.

The impact of the complexity of patient care on patient education is that nurses need to focus on health-centered patient education instead of prevention-centered or disease-centered patient education. In this case, the role...

Through this transformation, nurses are increasingly focusing on empowering patients to use their abilities, resources, and potentials in managing their health conditions. Generally, patient education is now centered on empowering patients to manage their health conditions rather than provision of health information to patients.
According to the Healthy People 2020, one of the major aspects of patient education is to help patients to understand how prevention can be integrated in the continuum of care beginning from the earliest stages (2011). Patients learn how to integrate prevention strategies in the continuum of care through the empowerment they receive during patient education. Therefore, the fundamental aspect brought by the ever-increasing complexities of care in patient education is transformation of the main focus of these strategies. The need for nurses to empower patients while providing patient education originates from the fact that dealing with complexities in patient care is becoming more difficult.