ABSTRACT

Abstract



Abstract

Aims

To review existing nursing research on inpatient hospitals' information technology (IT) systems in order to explore new approaches for evaluation research on nursing informatics to guide further design and implementation of effective IT systems.

Background

There has been an increase in the use of IT and information systems in nursing in recent years. However, there has been little evaluation of these systems and little guidance on how they might be evaluated.

Methods

A literature review was conducted between 1995 and 2005 inclusive using CINAHL and Medline and the search terms 'nursing information systems', 'clinical information systems', 'hospital information systems', 'documentation', 'nursing records', 'charting'. Articles related to full electronic patient record systems or electronic nursing record systems were kept for review, whereas those related to specific applications, such as medication prescription, decision-support systems, laboratory or X-ray images were rejected. In addition, articles which focused only on classification systems and taxonomies were rejected. Finally, as the review refers only to the inpatient setting, articles carried out in outpatient areas were excluded. A total of 74 articles was selected for full article review, some of these could not be obtained or were rejected for the above reasons, leaving 39 items to be used for the review.

In addition, a manual review of the past five years of articles in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, International Journal of Medical Information and Computers in Nursing and a manual search of papers in the reference lists of the systematic reviews was carried out.

Results

Research in nursing information systems was analysed and some deficiencies and contradictory results were identified which impede a comprehensive understanding of effective implementation. There is a need for IT systems to be understood from a wider perspective that includes aspects related to the context where they are implemented. Potential benefits of IT such as accessibility, readability, completeness, ...