Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology Patient Care
Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology
Patient Care
Engaging nurses in healthcare technology will have considerable impacts on patient care. Healthcare technologies provide nurses with advanced tools that improve patient care. Through health communication and information technologies, nurses can learn evidence-based best practices in care that improve their patient’s outcomes (Moore et al., 2020). Additionally, these technologies ensure an efficient flow of health information, thereby ensuring that nurses provide appropriate and timely care to their patients.
Protected Health Information (PHI)
Nurses’ engagement with technology can also enable them to provide better safeguards for the security, privacy, and confidentiality of protected health information. Besides, Park & Jeong (2021) assert that providers’ knowledge of technology use gives them a better sense of implementing the required security safeguards on PHI. Fostering communication between providers is the first strategy to protect PHI effectively. Effective communication provides a platform for educating providers on creating a security culture and the significance of protecting PHI. The creation of a security policy is also valuable in this regard. Policies that direct workflow using technological devices such as mobile phones and forbidding their use for sharing PHI for non-medical reasons may prevent breaches in the security, privacy, and confidentiality of PHI (Keshta & Odeh, 2021). Nurse informaticists can also work with other interdisciplinary team members to keep healthcare information systems updated, ensure that security settings are configured correctly and that data stored or transmitted through these systems are encrypted.
Workflow, Costs, and Return on Investment
Nurses’ engagement with technology will also have a positive effect on workflow. Healthcare information technologies ensure an efficient and effective flow of health information (Moore et al., 2020). Knowing these systems will therefore enhance nurses’ workflow within the care system. Engaging nurses in technology is a worthy investment. Recruiting nursing informaticists fetches significant financial considerations as the average salary of a nurse’s informaticist is slightly above 100,000 dollars (per a survey by HIMSS). However, this is a worthy investment with a significant return on investment. Besides, their role in facilitating technology use in healthcare will significantly reduce administration costs of healthcare, which in the long term will lower the overall cost of healthcare.
Opportunities and Challenges
The addition of a nurse informaticist will provide several opportunities for nurses and other caregivers. It will give them a platform to learn more about existing healthcare technologies and how they can leverage these technologies to improve patient care. Healthcare providers will also be able to utilize evidence-based practices that support patient-centered and safe approaches to care by including nurse informaticists in care provision. The addition of an informaticist’s role will also ensure seamless inter-professional workflow and communication facilitated by healthcare communication technologies. The inclusion of nurse informaticists may, however, present specific challenges. Role confusion with other IT team members, lack of organizational goodwill or rigidity of members to change, and lack of organizational leadership to oversee their integration into clinical teams may hinder their effectiveness.
Interdisciplinary team collaboration is necessary to improve quality outcomes through technology. Best practices in team collaborations, such as effective communication, role definition, information sharing, cooperation, and mutual respect between team members, may help team members work collaboratively to leverage existing technologies and optimize clinical outcomes. Organizational leadership also plays a role. They are responsible for steering the organization during change processing involving the implementation of various technologies in healthcare.
The significance of nurse informaticists in leveraging technology in information management warrants their addition to this care organization. As Haupeltshofer et al. (2020) report, nurse informaticists will tailor available health information technologies to facilitate information flow within the hospital. They will also educate other nurses and caregivers on the effective use of available technologies. They will also be proactive in researching potential areas in the hospital information flow framework where breaches are likely to occur and recommend how to address them. All these functionalities are vital for this care organization.
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