Healthcare technology provides numerous opportunities for improving patient care by automating processes, enhancing safety, and facilitating timely interactions. Proper clinical documentation is vital for the safety of health records and enabling data-driven patient care. Like many nursing projects, implementing a new documentation system requires teamwork. The implementation team shares skills and perspectives and collaborates to ensure deliverables are accomplished as expected. Effective participation of a nurse leader in systems development and implementation requires knowledge of what each step of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) entails. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the nurse leader can participate as outlined in each step.
Informatics projects require clear timelines, goals, and scope. They seek to address a particular problem hampering the effectiveness or efficiency of patient care. Broadly, planning is primarily about a feasibility study to determine the potential impact of the proposed project (Indhumathi et al., 2021). Effective planning defines the existing system’s problem and the new system’s objectives. Requirements include the resources, skills, time, and the number of project team members. The nurse leader can help identify requirements for the new documentation system to ensure the expected performance and costs are detailed in the feasibility report.
System analysis is critical to developing an approach model based on the requirements. According to Longshore et al. (2023), the analysis is about “what” for the system; thus, the implementation team should specify what the system should do to fulfill customers’ needs. Besides, the team should understand “how to do” the needed changes to ensure the right solution. As a result, the designers should study the requirements in-depth to identify the role of the documentation system and its projected purpose. The nurse leader can help with task analysis and expression in a form that enables the team to assemble suitable hardware and software components for optimal task performance. Generally, this step is about determining the system functions and its relationship with internal and external systems. The primary output is the system proposal.
In this step, the system development moves to the technical stage. In this phase, the focus is on what the system should do to meet user requirements. Design-related components include the system’s architecture, interface, programs, and databases (Indhumathi et al., 2021; Li et al., 2021). For a clinical documentation system, the focus should be on how it will facilitate data storage, communication, and seamless clinical procedures. As part of the development team, the nurse leader can collaborate with other team members to decide data inputs, draw models, and describe the data requirements. Other roles include helping in logical and physical designs to develop general and detailed user interface specifications.
System developers should be aware of this step’s complexity and time-consuming nature. Everyone must be available and play their role effectively. Implementation involves building the system through construction and installation as the design prompts (Dennis et al., 2021). Before installation, intensive testing (test cases) is recommended to observe whether the system shows the expected output/behavior. The nurse leader can help to test the system to ensure quality through the unit, integration, and validation testing. After testing, the old documentation system is turned off, and the new one commences operations. As Dennis et al. (2021) stated, conversion training is crucial to ensure users are skilled to operate the new system. This training also improves confidence and helps users to manage the resultant organizational changes.
Nursing documentation systems should work efficiently for a long time. Post-implementation support is primarily about continuous performance assessment and system maintenance to execute minor and major changes (Dennis et al., 2021). As part of the implementation team, the nurse leader should help establish a support plan for the system. System maintenance helps to correct errors, ensure the system is current through frequent updates, and improve performance (Indhumathi et al., 2021; Jenkins et al., 2021). The postimplementation support plan should outline the activities needed to achieve these goals and the responsible individuals.
Nursing documentation systems can impro
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