The Future of Nursing Informatics

 

          Technology and the effective use of it – is our future. The future of nursing and Nursing Informatics is in alignment with the future of healthcare – growth in the use of technology to ensure safety, positive outcomes and satisfaction of patients. Nursing is at the forefront of this wave of technology innovation.

 

The Nursing Unit of the Future provides nurses with an opportunity to experience, assess benefits and provide feedback regarding new information technologies prior to implementation house-wide. As the nurses evaluate the clinical efficacy of devices and applications, the Nursing Informatics team also evaluates technical and clinical outcomes criteria including: How devices withstand normal wear and tear, How easily information is gathered and recorded, User friendliness, Clinician satisfaction, Time efficiency versus existing methods, Impact on patient safety, Impact on patient satisfaction, and the Impact on caregiver satisfaction.
        
 

The future holds rapid and ongoing paradigm shifts for clinical caregivers, especially in the areas of electronic documentation, physician order entry and the collaborative transformation of clinical practice.
Technology holds the promise to eliminate redundancy, aggregate relevant information in easy to access and read formats and improve caregiver efficiency, as it enhances nursing practice and drives improvements in patient quality outcomes.

 

The Impact When Caring and Technology Meets

 

   Technology is an important component of the health care field because doctors, nurses and medical specialists use technology in the diagnosis and treatment of health problems.
    As health care organizations adopt information technology to improve quality and patient safety, reduce errors, increase efficiency, decrease time-consuming and redundant paperwork, and enhance communication, they’re finding that IT can significantly impact nursing work flow.

   

Today, we can say that technology really has a big impact on Nursing. This is apparent through the improvements on the four nursing areas. First in line is the Nursing Practice where EHR is being used for assessing problems, documenting care, tracking the care process and measuring the outcomes. Thus, the electronic version of nursing practice has revolutionized and transformed nursing practice. 

     

 

Second, the Nursing Administration in hospitals has also changed with the introduction of the computer that clinks nursing departments together. Most policy and procedure manuals are assessed and retrieved by computer. The Internet is being used by nurses to access digital libraries, online resources, and research protocols at the bedside.

 

Nowadays, technology is everywhere, it makes other equipments work. it makes our job load easy with the collaboration of other equipments. Just like in the hospital, where we will be practicing our knowledge and skills in the near future, technology is such a very big help not only in terms of time saving but also in the accuracy of data and also in the aspect of critical observation needs for the patients. So, as we can see there is a good impact when these two aspect meets. But we must only assure that we are capable enough to handle it to provide safety of the patients. And that must be as always.

Factors of nursing knowledge on health care informatics

The Language of Nursing

An important part of this technique approach to technologically enhanced nursing care is the development of universal nursing data languages. The most prominent of these is the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) being developed by the International Council of Nurses (ICN). “The purpose of the ICNP is to provide a tool for describing and documenting key elements that represent clinical nursing practice”

It is important then, for nurses to become critically aware of how and why they are using computers in nursing care, and that they become knowledgeable and skilled enough to influence the way nursing care becomes digitized. “The nation is at a tipping point in applying enabling technologies to healthcare. With the push coming from the federal government and all corners of the field, this is indeed a far-reaching revolution. The time has come for healthcare to leave the manual tools of the past in the past and turn to the enablers of the 21st century. The nursing profession is being transformed to meet the needs of the new world and will be a major player in the revolution”

Information processing has been a vital part of nursing, far longer than the availability of computers and ICTs. “Information processing and communication are centrally involved in virtually all health care activities, including obtaining and recording information about patients; communication among health care professionals; accessing medical literature; selecting diagnostic procedures; interpreting laboratory results; and collecting clinical research data” ).

ICT advancement has made it possible to utilize technology to quicken all of these activities, to access a digitally stored pool of literature, statistics, and research data to assist in decisions, and provide a language for nurses to use to record and plan individual client care. 

Point to Ponder:

 "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination." Albert Einstein