Patient Care
Fully engaging nurses in health care technology impacts patient care, workflow, and costs. Evidence-based practice is the current nursing care paradigm shift. Practice guidelines and decision-making require clinical evidence to improve patient safety and quality of care. Fully engaging nurses in health care technology will enable them to stay abreast of the current practice guidelines and information for decision-making. Healthcare technologies will enable nurses to access evidence-based information from online databases and also enable them to analyze future outcomes of practice using current and past data and information. Therefore, patient care outcomes result from safe and current evidence-based practices.
Protected Health Information
Protected health information (PHI) can be used to identify patients; inappropriate handling of this information can lead to a breach of patient privacy, confidentiality, and data security. As aforementioned, nurse informaticists enable communication between interdisciplinary team members to ensure successful care coordination. However, coordination requires the collection and sharing of patient information that can include PHI.
Nurse informaticists ensure that this information is protected by implementing access controls such as ensuring secure communication in the team and regularly assessing and emulation the system communication methods to ensure that PHI privacy and security are not breached (Lindley et al., 2020). In-service staff session updates ensure that nursing staff and other healthcare professionals’ knowledge and information skills are up-to-date with PHI privacy rules and guidelines (Park & Jeong, 2021). This increases professionalism that increases awareness levels.
Workflow
Nurse engagement in healthcare technology improves workflow by enhancing care flexibility, improving care efficiency, and facilitating collaboration. Nurses can deliver care remotely to their patients by using technology. Additionally, they can deliver care in a shorter time using technology to care interventions and prevent errors. Finally, nurses’ full engagement in technology enables them to collaborate with other care professionals through effective communication.
Costs and Return on Investment
As aforementioned, fully engaging nurses in healthcare technology improves car efficiency. Efficiency improvement reduces the work input required to achieve care outcomes. However, the costs of the initial implementation strategies will increase due to the costs of purchasing these technologies and training nurses on how to use them. When used efficiently and successfully, technologies could improve patient outcomes in terms of safety, costs, and quality.
Opportunities and Challenges
Adding a nurse informaticist’s role would improve care efficiency by improving technology uptake and use among team members. This technology would enhance interdisciplinary collaboration to improve workflow and team outcomes, such as work efficiencies. Therefore, the addition of a nurse informaticist role would generally improve care delivery in the interdisciplinary approach.
However, adding a nurse informaticist role would change the workflow in the healthcare organization because they would take up some of the current roles in the work. Role overlap can lead to conflicts that would deter successful collaboration. Therefore, team planning and nursing leadership are required to ensure successful collaboration within the team. Team communication and regular monitoring of team outcomes would improve collaboration. Team decision-making could ensure that every member owns the outcomes of the team activities.
This proposal has analyzed the benefits and shortcomings of adding a nurse informaticist role into the organization’s workforce structure. These are the four key takeaways from the proposal about the nurse informaticist role. Nursing informatics is a field that combines nursing science with information and computer science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice.
The role of the nurse informaticist is to support the use of technology in nursing practice and facilitate the integration of technology into the daily work of nurses and other healthcare providers. Fully engaging nurses in health care technology can have several positive impacts on patient care, including improved patient outcomes, reduced errors, and increased patient satisfaction.
The addition of a nurse informaticist role to an interdisciplinary tea
Struggling with online classes or exams? Get expert help to ace your coursework, assignments, and tests stress-free!