Please reply to Jonathan – Please note minimum of 200 words. No sources citation needed.
Jonathan B posted
Nursing informatics is a specialty that merges the knowledge of nursing, communications, computer science, and information technology. Informatics nurses analyze systems and merge then into a healthcare system (Staggers, 2002). In today’s worlds nurses relay heavily on technology to help them access critical data on patients and help create a plan of care and the direction they need to go in order to help a patient improve.
The material in this course has changed the way I practice. I constantly think of ways that can help nurse streamline the way we work. Adapting technology to nursing to benefit the patients we care for and the workload of nurses. Recently I had an idea popup in my head because of what we have been learning in this course. I decided to try a test on the charting system I use in surgery. I was charting without any interruption, and I timed myself on how fast I could do it which ended up being twelve minutes. Later on that week, I tried the same test again but with a touchscreen computer and only used touchscreen to enter the information. Again, without any interruptions, I was able to complete the chart for surgery in 8 minutes. Most of the time during the charting process there is interruptions but besides that finding that charting by using a touchscreen can speed up the process. This makes me think that wanting to adapt to a mobile device for charting is a possibility that could work well.
The material in this course has helped me to understand informatics in a new light and changed my professional practice in a way that I understand the process of integrating new processes into organizations for advancing technology in the workplace. Being technologically challenged, meaning I have difficulty enjoying learning about technological topics, this class has helped me by breaking down the information in an easy-to-understand manner. Informatics using electronic health records allows healthcare professionals maintain large quantities of patient data securely, stay up to date on standards of care to deliver quality care to patients and follow evidence-based practice. The purpose of nursing informatics is to make healthcare easier, aid in overall patient care, and ultimately improve the lives of everyone in the community by lowering the cost of healthcare. (School of Nursing University of Michigan, 2020).
My first job as an LPN in a long-term care facility in Arizona (in 2015) we used paper charting and paper medication administration records. I enjoyed that aspect of the job because I do not enjoy using a computer for every aspect of nursing. Now I better understand why electronic health records have been federally mandated. The main goal of implementing technologies such as EHRSs is to improve the quality and safety of patient care through benefits such as: improving the accuracy and completeness of patient health information; increasing the speed at which care is provided; enhancing the coordination of care; and increasing transparency of health information for patients and their families. (Hebda et. al., 2019).
Informatics also allows healthcare providers to communicate more effectively between organizations to improve healthcare delivery across national and international lines. The NACNEP recommended to prepare nurses to adopt intelligent and quality-based information technology use in patient care by implementing five strategies: providing core informatics courses to nursing schools, educating nurses specialized in informatics skills who are able to solve related issues, offering more powerful nursing care through the implication of telecommunication projects, preparing more nursing faculties in the informatics field to facilitate students skills enhancement and enhancing collaboration to advance informatics. (Darvish et. al., 2014).