Informatics in the workplace
The nursing profession today is taking a more advanced and technical role that just the bedside activities that define the role of the traditional nurse. The current working environment is more concerned about improved patient outcomes, safe working environment and decision-making as well as patient-centered care. This holistic approach is centered on the need to have a wide base of systematic and organize information. Respectively, the role of technology in healthcare has consistently helped in the coordination and improvement of care through various aspects. This has not only helped the nurses provide more responsive care but as substantially placed the nurse at the helm of policy making within the healthcare setting. As a result, the nurse’s role has been made a lot easier amidst a very dynamic working environment where acute and specific acre is the order of the day.
Information management in healthcare comes in a variety of ways. As such, the role of nursing informatics is to aid in the decision-making process. This is through providing an avenue that can integrate data, knowledge and information to help the care provider and the patient to make an informed decision. In one aspect, the informatics helps in preserving data integrity. This eliminates the possibilities of erroneous data that can lead to erroneous clinical decisions. At the optimal level of data integrity, decision making is facilitated to improve outcomes while also; the information can be applied in staff education.
Similarly, such data can be effectively used in research to help develop evidence-bas practices that would have been a tough task using paper records. Verification techniques and system prompts especially in acute care have been a major step in the right direction for nurses as it eliminated the burden of monitoring two or more aspects of care simultaneously. This means that issues of issues of errors in procedures, timing and mediation are eliminated. All anal, the ability of informatics to integrate both clinical data and administrative data has helped the nurses in policy making in regard to staffing, retention rates and other healthcare concerns that may affect outcomes.
