Telehealth, Informatics, and the U.S. Nursing Shortage
This paper examines the growing shortage of health care providers in the United States and explores how health informatics and telemedicine can help mitigate the crisis. Drawing on nursing workforce data, Institute of Medicine recommendations, and informatics literature, the paper identifies key drivers of the shortage—including an aging population, high nurse turnover, inadequate informatics education, and the pull of specialized technology roles away from primary care. It then analyzes how telehealth tools and electronic health records can expand care access and reduce facility burdens, while arguing that integrating informatics more deeply into nursing curricula is essential to preparing a workforce capable of delivering care in the digital age.
- Introduction: A Looming Health Care Crisis: COVID-19 intensifies America's looming nursing shortage
- Causes of the Nursing Shortage: Aging population, APRN barriers, and high turnover
- Informatics and Telemedicine as a Solution: Telehealth and EHRs expand access and reduce burdens
- The Role of Nursing Education in Informatics: Informatics gaps in nursing curricula drive turnover
- Informatics as Both Problem and Opportunity: Specialty informatics pulls nurses from primary care
- Cultural and Systemic Dimensions of the Shortage: Cultural attitudes and COVID-19 reshape health care values
- Conclusion: The Future of Telehealth and Nursing: Telehealth positions informatics as essential future solution
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper integrates multiple credible sources—including workforce statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Institute of Medicine policy recommendations—to build a layered, evidence-based argument.
- It acknowledges complexity by treating informatics as both a contributing cause of and a solution to the nursing shortage, demonstrating nuanced critical thinking rather than one-sided advocacy.
- The paper connects a broad policy issue (health care workforce shortages) to a concrete technological solution (telemedicine), grounding abstract arguments in practical application.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses a problem-solution structure supported by literature synthesis. Rather than simply summarizing sources, the author uses each citation to advance a specific argumentative claim—for instance, using Clemmer (1995) and Demiris (2003) to establish telemedicine as an informatics-enabled fix, and then using Haddad and Toney-Butler (2019) to complicate the narrative by showing that the same field can also worsen the shortage.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by framing the urgency of the nursing shortage, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. It then systematically identifies causes—aging populations, bureaucratic barriers to APRN practice, high turnover, and inadequate education—before pivoting to solutions centered on informatics and telehealth. The middle sections explore informatics in nursing curricula and the tension between specialization and primary care. The paper closes by situating the shortage within cultural attitudes toward health care and reaffirming telehealth as the most promising path forward.
Introduction: A Looming Health Care Crisis
Snavely (2016) shows that the looming nursing shortage is due to hit America hard in the coming years, and that shortage is now more evident than ever following the arrival of COVID-19—especially in hard-hit areas like New York City, where hospitals have been overrun by infected patients. Shortages of health care providers are a major concern in the United States, particularly since the country is considered a world leader among nations, yet a critical element of its infrastructure—health care—is sorely lacking in provider support.
Now that the country has entered lockdown conditions, matters have worsened from an economic standpoint. Pursuing a medical education is expensive, and individuals and families may reassess their commitment to the field if a recession or depression looms as a result of shuttered businesses and mass unemployment. If economic hardship persists, the shortage of health care providers could grow considerably, as Snavely (2016) intimates, which will only worsen the problem with a pandemic that realistically has no clear end in sight.
References
Clemmer, T. P. (1995). The role of medical informatics in telemedicine. Journal of Medical Systems, 19(1), 47–58.
Demiris, G. (2003). Integration of telemedicine in graduate medical informatics education. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(4), 310–314.
Foster, M., & Sethares, K. (2017). Current strategies to implement informatics into the nursing curriculum: An integrative review. J Nurs Inform, 21(3).
Haddad, L. M., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2019). Nursing shortage. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.
Hasbrouck, L. (2016). Strengthening local health department informatics capacity through advocacy, education, and workforce development. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 22(Suppl 6), S3.
IOM. (2010). The future of nursing. Retrieved from http://nacns.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/5-IOM-Report.pdf
O'Brien, J. (2003). How nurse practitioners obtained provider status: Lessons for pharmacists. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 60(22), 2301–2307.
Snavely, T. M. (2016). A brief economic analysis of the looming nursing shortage in the United States. Nursing Economics, 34(2), 98–101.
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