How information and technology connect to patient care outcomes and a safe care environment
Explain why information and technology skills are essential for safe patient care.

Within the context of healthcare, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) represents a collection of services or ventures which facilitate remote patient care (telehealth), transfer of knowledge, and interdisciplinary clinical assistance. ICT usage can promote inexpensive client-focused care, improve knowledge sharing and care quality, decrease time of travel, ensure patients as well as healthcare workers are better informed, and foster a novel kind of provider-patient relationship (Alligood, 2014; Rouleau et al., 2015).

The Workforce Commission of the AAN (American Academy of Nursing) acknowledged the significance of efficient technology when it comes to enhancing care efficacy and safety, besides helping save time for nurses to conduct essential care activities. The RWJF (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)-sponsored TD2 (Technology Drill Down) initiative of the Commission dealt with the imminent nursing dearth for decreasing nursing care’s demand (Cassano, 2014). Endeavoring to discover technological resolutions to inefficacies in workflow on medico-surgical nurse units, the TD2 venture unites multidisciplinary teams for reviewing the nursing workflow’s present state, planning a desirable state for the future, and brainstorming technological solutions for filling gaps— with an overall, holistic aim of offering more effective, safer patient care.

A decision support system may be established for aiding healthcare practitioners in solving issues requiring specific decisions cropping up for the past three decades. The system serves to replace human knowledge’s role through formulating knowledge within itself (Darvish et al., 2014). An expert system forms the most widely-employed kind of support system for clinical decision-making, having applications within show notes, critical therapeutic strategies, diagnostic support, decision support, recovery, prescriptions, and identifying and interpreting pictures. But they may not be used as separate instruments replacing human expertise. Thus, knowledge management and such systems ought to be integrated. 

Identify the baccalaureate nurse's role in championing the use of information and technology to improve safety and patient outcomes.

Within the contemporary age, ICT’s potential for application has been growing; such technologies are now capable of enhancing nursing outcome quality (Rouleau et al., 2015). Nursing practitioners are the healthcare provider group whose role requires maximum interaction with patients; furthermore, they also interact more often with technology. The adoption of technology ought to result in positive nurse attitudes, thereby increasing their productivity. Nurses must participate in initial systems design for improving patient care quality and altering their practice culture to facilitate this.

Nursing’s technological and technical mediation on the medicine-nursing border...…advantages of such features are improved information capture efficacy, legibility, document reliability and completeness, and promptness. But if not utilized properly, and in the absence of adequate controls and knowledge, such features may result in incorrect documentation, possibly ending up in charges of fraud or clinical errors. Mistakes linked to templates and copy-pasting functionality form a couple of widely occurring EHR risks linked to improper documentation capture. 

The widespread application of copying-pasting (or cloning, carrying forward, and copying forward, as it is sometimes referred to) (Bowman, 2013) text from diverse health record locations, from one encounter only or from earlier encounters, represents a major EHR-related issue, which is aggravating with expansion of EHR use. Some of the risks to integrity of documentation due to incorrect copy/paste utilization are:

· Imprecise or out-of-date information;

· Propagating false facts;

· Redundant data that hinders identification of current information;

· Failure to cite documentation purpose or author;

· Failure to identify date of creation of documentation;

· Needlessly long progress notes and

· Internally conflicting progress notes (Bowman, 2013).

Eventually, the health record’s integrity and credibility are damaged, with real possibility of patient harm.