You decide to pursue proposing a nurse informaticist role in your organization. You speak to your chief nursing officer (CNO) and human resources (HR) manager, who ask you to prepare a 4–5 page evidence-based proposal to support the new role. In this way, they can decide whether adding such a role could justify the return on investment (ROI).
Nursing Informatics in Health Care
The modern healthcare landscape has revolutionized care operationalization, shifting care toward value-based approaches. Technology has played an integral role in this revolution. Healthcare technologies continue to redefine several components of healthcare provision. Accordingly, nursing informatics provides an avenue by which these technologies can seamlessly integrate into nursing practice. Nursing informatics is targeted at improving health at the lowest cost possible. This proposal details nursing informatics, the role of a nurse informaticist, and their impact on healthcare.
Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist
Nursing informatics is an emerging field in nursing that integrates nursing knowledge and technology to identify, communicate and manage health information. This specialty is targeted at optimizing healthcare outcomes while minimizing healthcare costs. Nurse informaticists are specialists in nursing informatics. Nurse informaticists advance healthcare by working as developers of healthcare communication and information technologies. Nurse informaticists also work as educators, researchers, software engineers, and policy developers (Kaihlanen et al., 2021). The American Medical Informatics Association outlines the core work areas of nurse informaticists. These areas include research methodologies to design and disseminate novel nursing knowledge, building interoperable data infrastructure and retrieving and presenting health information that supports patient-centred approaches.
Nurse Informaticists and Other Health Care Organizations
Several care organizations have continuously engaged nurse informaticists within their frameworks of care provision. The Southwest Hospital recently recruited nursing informaticians in their chronic care clinics. This recruitment came against the backdrop of complaints by healthcare providers over telehealth software used by the hospital to monitor patients under the home-based care continuum. These providers were having challenges integrating wearable technologies into the patient portals. Recruiting nursing informaticists into their operationalization framework ensured the resolution of this problem and enhanced the hospital’s efficiency in integrating these wearable technologies.
Interactions between the nurse informaticists recruited to the hospital and other multidisciplinary team members were initially slow. This was mainly due to role confusion between them and other ICT personnel in the hospital. However, this was curtailed by establishing a functional work structure that outlined the role of either. Healthcare providers were also informed of the presence of nurse informaticists and directed to channel their complaints to them. Currently, nurse informaticists and other caregivers within this hospital exist harmoniously. They are valued for their expertise in informatics and their role in resolving information and communication technology issues that ensue during care provision.
Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology
Nurses play an integral role in patient management. Healthcare technologies allow nurses to improve their care processes, communication efficiency, and effectiveness. By fully engaging with these technologies, nurses can communicate effectively, thus minimizing medical and medication-related errors accustomed to communication gaps or deficiencies. It also positively impacts patient care by ensuring that the nursing interventions selected for the patients are optimal and effective in alleviating their suffering (Farokhzadian et al., 2020). Nurses should thus be allowed to engage fully with healthcare technologies.
Safeguarding patients’ protected health information (PHI) is a fundamental role of nurses and other caregivers. Nursing informaticists, as educators and healthcare information technologists, can provide training on hospital information technologies containing PHI to other interdisciplinary team members. This training should highlight privacy, security, and confidentiality safeguard measures on these technologies and provide a framework for identifying and resolving hospital information technology software issues that may result in data leaks (Kamerer & McDermott, 2020). These measures will ensure that PHI is safeguarded against unintended use or malicious use as provided by the HIPAA privacy rule.
Engaging nurses in healthcare technology may also positively impact workflow. Healthcare technologies have provisions for workflow automation that considerably lower the time taken for care processes. These technologies also improve communication between individual nurses and other caregivers. By automating nursing processes and improving communication between nurses, these technolog