NURSING INFORMATICS

Nursing Informatics

Nursing Informatics

As a practicing Registered Nurse, analysis of industry trends, and literature illustrates how until recently, industry behemoths with the market power to dictate change, witnessed a rapid immersion and development of their IT culture. In healthcare, no single organization is so large or influential that it can dictate to the rest of the industry what to do by mere example and expect it to follow; so IT culture has been slower to develop, with advances coming mostly via the trickle down theory. Healthcare organizations typically spend between 3 and 4 percent of their budgeted capital on IT. Clinical experience and a review of literature has shown there to exist a number of initiatives which have stoked the IT revolution in American healthcare (Fromberg, 2003).

As a practicing hospital-based RN, the effort to deliver high-quality patient care requires adaptation to continual, often turbulent shifts and changes in adopting IT as a means of delivering high-quality patient care (Scalet, 2003).

An inventory of situational approaches, passive inquiry of physicians, collateral health-care providers, and review of literature, identified the following opportunities recognized secondary to the effective use of IT.

The central role of the physician is the provision of care to individual patients. This process centres on the consultation between the physician and the patient. This process requires and generates information, historically recorded on a paper based medium (Weber, 2003). The limitations of paper records as a standard repository of information, is universally recognized as lacking the dynamic which electronic data medium promise: in effect, paper strangles the process of delivering timely high quality health-care delivery.

Entities which are converting to electronic patient records, report greater flexibility in their ability to deliver timely, high-quality patient care. Factors enabling such flexibility are (Scalet, 2003);

A means of transfer of computerized records when patients ...