Healthcare Informatics Paper

1356 Words3 Pages

This scholarly paper will focus on the impact of information technology when it comes to workflow and how to use the knowledge learned from the healthcare informatics course to ameliorate a working environment. Healthcare has undergone a lot of changes over the past 30 years. Nursing, as a health care profession, has cemented itself as a major player in the health care system. Any changes in health care significantly affect nursing, as we have seen with technology. Technology has changed the health industry over the last 20 plus years. Many clinicians have learned informatics and technology through the changes in their workplace because it is used as the primary tool of communication. Nursing has evolved along with technology and has shown …show more content…

Collaborate with the team and advocate about hospitals units integrating education tools about nursing informatics during their monthly meeting. It is an excellent idea to show nurses that the emergence of new technology into the nursing field has helped reduce medication errors, improve patient’s safety, made the patient’s health records readily available to the patient and clinicians. Although available, healthcare technology must be used thoughtfully in the clinical setting by protecting patient’s privacy. Some of the challenges of implementing healthcare technology include: protecting the patient's privacy, the literacy of health care employees and the cost of and application of the new program. Integrating technology into health care is very expensive because health care institutions must buy the best system available (i.e. cerner, epic), spend time and money to train employees. Nurses play an intricate role when it comes to implementing new technologies in their workplace. They must be trained with the skills to help use new devices. Being at the bedside, their interpretation and knowledge through charting allow other disciplines to see how the patient is progressing clinically. For example, a common problem like medication errors and adverse drug effect can be prevented due to health informatics. The goal is to increase …show more content…

Nursing provides holistic care by addressing all the patient needs. Holistic care is done by constant communication with the professional team, the support staff, the patient and family. Poor communication is one of the biggest problems when it comes to coordination of care between disciplines. Health informatics and technology was developed to enhance communication; when used correctly, information technology can make the communication more fluid. The staff needs to understand that communication is like a giant web of work flow and nurses represent the center piece. At the bedside, the nurse charting needs to reliable and represent a clear picture of the patient mental, physical, spiritual, and social needs so many disciplines can retrieve, read the nursing notes and understand the patient clinical needs. When other disciplines can quickly retrieve the nursing notes, it allows nurses to spend less time on the phone updating them repeatedly about the patient clinical needs. A nurse with good documentation can just direct other team members to her charting. The nurse can now spend more time focusing on another aspect of the daily assignment such as patient

Open Document