NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care Challenges and Opportunities

NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care

Challenges and Opportunities

The field of nurse informatics is still young and nurse informaticists are often the pioneers and end up facing challenges with their organization roles, hardware or software problems, and interactions with other professionals. First, integrating the role of nurse informaticist with that of other healthcare specialists, including nurses, presents a major challenge. For example, some older doctors and nurses may lack computer skills and be reluctant to change their mode of working. Besides, nurse informaticists must communicate and translate for IT fields integral to the design of EHR and nursing documentation systems (Peltonen et al., 2019). Another challenge is that it takes a substantial amount of time for one to become a nurse informaticist. Newly hired nurses should practice and refine their clinical skills to understand the complexity of what nurses do and how to document activities.

Referencing a 2011 study that was carried out on nursing informatics by Murphy (2011), Greenwood (2020) found that 66% of informaticists had 11-16 years of clinical experience prior to transitioning into informatics, and more than 50% had graduate degrees implying that informaticists went back to school. Another challenge relates to averting destruction and fragmentation. Greenwood (2020) observed that nurses are ill-prepared to assume their roles in a highly technological environment where documentation is done electronically. Because of this, nurse informaticists must step in to teach and persuade nurses of the value of electronic documentation systems to prevent tech from fragmenting patient care and creating destructive elements. Shapland (2022) identified barriers to successful implementation of nurse informatics as physician orders taking long to be entered, cyber security and patient confidentiality, fear of technology and learning new ways of working, high investment of time of doctors and medical staff to be trained, poor communication between programs for inpatient-outpatient and inter-facility, inadequate financial services, staffing issues, and lack of integration in computer systems and software.

Even with these challenges, nurse informatics presents numerous opportunities for transforming and enhancing healthcare. These include facilitating care coordination, tracking data over time, reducing human errors, improving practice efficiencies, and improving clinical outcomes (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017).

Takeaways

There is a need to implement informatics in the organization to improve patient outcomes. With their competencies in computer skills, informatics skills, and information knowledge, nurse informaticists can improve patient monitoring, help in the preparation of charts for process information flow, information flow interpretation, and the design of the database and standard structures to improve clinical care, research, and administration (Bowles, 2017). They can add value to the organization by improving information technology integration in the nursing profession. Secondly, healthcare organizations have shifted from profit models to delivering value-based care. Informatics can help in these efforts to provide research and evidence-based treatment that prevents costly procedures. One way to harness data from electronic medical records and ubiquitous health devices to eliminate waste and standardize care is through decision support systems (Bowes, 2017). Informaticists can help implement such software programs to analyze client data and provide important insights such as clinical guidelines. With a functional decision support system, the organization can make diagnoses and elicit timely reminders and prompts during treatment.

Lastly, delivering quality patient care requires collaboration among medical professionals working in different organizations, departments, or facilities. Effective communication and coordinated care can allow people involved in diagnoses and treatment to organize their efforts and share details. Informatics is important in leveraging these efforts. When healthcare professionals easily access information about their needs, they can make informed choices and prioritize patient safety. With well robust privacy and security measures, caregivers can share important medical records thus avoiding redundant procedures and delivering the best treatment (Bowles, 2017).