Informatics Telehealth and the Health Care Shortage
Snavely (2016) shows that the looming nursing shortage is due to hit America hard in the coming years, and that shortage is now evident more than ever with the arrival of the novel coronavirus in America—especially in hard hit areas like New York City, where the hospitals are being overrun by patients infected by the virus. Shortages of health care providers is a major concern in the US, especially since the US is meant to be a world leader among other nations—and yet an element of its critical infrastructure, health care, is sorely lacking in support in the form of providers. Now that the country has gone into lockdown mode, it is only making matters worse from an economic point of view: going to school for medicine is expensive and individuals and families may reassess their commitment to the field if they see a recession or, worse, a depression coming as a result of the lockdown that is putting millions out of work and shuttering businesses right and left—potentially for good. If economic woes persist for the remainder of the year, the shortage of health care providers could grow considerably, as Snavely (2016) intimates, which will only worsen the problem with the current pandemic that realistically speaking has no end in sight.

Shortages of health care providers is an issue that has to be addressed—but why is it happening? Currently, the US is facing an aging population that will have a chronic need for increased care in the coming years, and the Affordable Care Act passed under the Obama Administration has ensured this population that care will be provided for them. Yet the American Nurses Association has noted that through 2022 there will be more positions available for registered nurses than for any other job in America (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2019). The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that some 11 million nursing positions will need to be filled in the coming years and that the health care industry is going to grow more than any other industry in the country over the next six years (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2019). But shortages, high turnover and poor distribution of health care providers persists. What are the reasons for this and what can be done to address them?

The Institute of Medicine (2010) has noted that access to care needs to be improved in the US and one way to do that is for states to allow APRNs to practice to the full scope and extent of their education and training. O’Brien (2003) points out that, indeed, Advanced Practice Registered Nurses were originally trained to take the place of doctors leaving primary care for specialized medicine. APRNs in other words have been trained and educated from the beginning to fill the gap in health care—yet some states still refuse to allow them to practice independently of physicians, even though APRNs have the education and training to do so. The shortage of health care providers thus persists in part because of bureaucratic hang-ups regarding the adequacy of nurses to do what doctors do. Another problem leading to the shortage of health care providers is the lack of readiness that providers have to make the transition from school to the real world. Turnover among nurses and care providers is still too high to ensure proper nurse to patient ratios in most facilities. Is there a solution from an informatics point of view to address this shortage of health care providers?

According to Clemmer (1995) there is: informatics can play a big role in telemedicine, which can be used to address the shortages of health care providers and improve access to care by allowing care providers to communicate with and monitor patients from long distances using the Internet. Instead of having patients come in to facilities and endure long wait times and lead to facilities being overrun, telemedicine can eliminate space and time obstacles and get care to patients simply and easily without much...…that they see as legitimate and honorable.

So while Haddad and Toney-Butler (2019) lament the fact that informatics as a specialized field in health care may be drawing potential primary care health care providers away from the field, the reality is that informatics are needed and is a necessary part of what it means to be a health care worker today. Informatics are required for getting information out fast and allowing care providers to know what is going on with a patient immediately. It is good for recording information accurately and standardizing the care process.

The best part of informatics and how it can help with the shortage situation that it may or may not be partly to be blame for is that it assists with telemedicine which is a new approach to health care that can help to close the gap and address the health care shortage issue. The more that telemedicine and telehealth can be incorporated into the health care system overall, the more of an impact individual nurses can have on a greater extent of the population. Through telemedicine anyone with an Internet connection can gain access to the care they require, can be monitored, or can meet with health care providers to go over options, and so on.

Health care shortages are an issue, but the possibilities afforded by communications technology in the 21st century show promise. Informatics may be luring potential nurses away from actual nursing, but the plus side is that informatics supports telemedicine in a big way and makes it possible for the former to work efficiently. So whether one sees informatics as a problem in terms of the nursing shortage or as a benefit, the reality is that there are many factors that are contributing to the current health care shortage—but the field of informatics is definitely a field that is required because it will support the health care approaches of the future, which are found in telehealth.