Posted: August 31st, 2022

The impact of health informatics on nursing practice

The impact of health informatics on nursing practice
Health informatics, or rather referred to as Health information systems, entails the practice of incorporating the science of nursing, computer science, and information science to collect, manage, communicate, and store data and knowledge. Today, more health facilities continue to adopt this technology that allows health care providers and nurses to collect, record, and analyze vast amounts of data more effectively. Following technological advancements in the past decade, health informatics has become a significant part of nursing and continues to transform nursing practice in many ways.
One way that informatics has impacted nursing is through improved documentation. Nurses are the primary caregivers because they are in direct contact with patients during the treatment process. To care for their patients effectively, they need to access a patient’s medical information, history, imaging, lab results, and physician’s report to get a clear a complete picture of the patient’s health status. Informatics allows the nurses to record and access all the patient’s data through the electric health records and other systems. This has contributed significantly to improving patient satisfaction and health care outcomes.
Health informatics has also played an important role in reducing medical errors and associated care costs. Patient safety can only exist where good communication between nurses and physicians exists. Using the traditional paper documentation system required nurses to transcribe the providers’ orders by hand. Issues such as poor handwriting, mistakes, and human errors often resulted in medical errors, omissions, promoting lower patient outcomes.
Health care informatics, particularly the electric health record system, allows nurses to receive information in digital form and get the accurate prescription in real-time. Some technologies analyze the prescription in relation to their condition, existing allergies, and other current medications of the patient and give an alert, further promoting patient safety.
Lastly, health informatics has promoted informed nursing practice. Nursing informatics focuses on using the best ways and approaches to achieve better patient outcomes. It involves employing nursing best practices to achieve higher outcomes. Nursing informaticists are primarily involved in developing and improving technologies, reviewing clinical workflows, and designing and analyzing new diagnostics and treatment plans. They achieve this by analyzing existing care methods with objective facts to establish which options will most likely provide better outcomes in value, quality, and costs.
Being a relatively new and upcoming technology, there is criticism regarding health informatics’s ability to improve health care and patient outcome. However, there is compelling evidence showing that health informatics are already revolutionizing health care in unprecedented ways. Nurses who are skilled and knowledgeable in informatics have been seen to be more productive during practice now more than ever.
References
Kinnunen, U. M., Heponiemi, T., Rajalahti, E., Ahonen, O., Korhonen, T., & Hyppönen, H. (2019). Factors Related to Health Informatics Competencies for Nurses—Results of a National Electronic Health Record Survey. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 37(8), 420-429.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2021). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Sewell, J. (2018). Informatics and nursing. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

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