Impact of Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology
The engagement of nurses in the implementation of technology tools such as the electronic medical record and mobile health has contributed a lot to improving healthcare service provision and patient outcomes. According to (Azoui et al., 2021), using mHealth has assisted in patient motivation, engagement, and behavior change. For example, healthcare workers use mHealth to monitor patient health progress through Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, the tools also enable the healthcare workers to be among themselves and with the patients. Throughout their practice, the nurse informaticists must ensure that the patients’ data recorded is per HIPAA privacy policies because the mHealth and Electronic Medical Record store confidential information about the patients. Engagement of nurses in healthcare technology has also decreased the costs of workflow.
Challenges and Opportunities
The roles of the nurse informaticists and their interaction with the interdisciplinary team have both opportunities and challenges. With nurse informaticists, health information has been easily accessible because the nurses participate in promoting healthcare technology adoption (Garcia, 2021)). For this reason, the workflow will be enhanced, making it easy to minimize errors while dealing with complex duties. With information technology, nurses and other medical practitioners can carry out services such as drug prescription, the booking of patients, and patient monitoring by using the mHealth and Electronic Medical Record tools.
On the other hand, the challenges facing nursing informatics include difficulty in adopting technology changes but the older nurses. The older nurses during their training were not exposed to technology, and they, therefore, do not know the importance of using technology in health service provision (Luo, 2019). The other challenge is the violation of the HIPAA privacy policies by the interdisciplinary team during the early phase of technology adoption. Additionally, the multidisciplinary team can also be influenced when an external party leaks information due to illegitimate applications.
Recommendations
This proposal has highlighted the importance of having nurse informaticists, especially for the organization that plans to adopt the healthcare technology tool to provide healthcare service. Both Texas and John Peter Smith Hospital have adopted two technology tools, the mHealth and Electronic Medical Records. Embracing technology in healthcare will enable smooth interaction between healthcare providers and patients by virtually linking up the facility services.