The 21st century is a time of rapid development in the field of nursing. Over the last twenty years, there has been an uneven amount of disease outbreaks, including a Covid-19 pandemic, which has stopped society’s normal functioning for several months (Suleman et al., 2020). Nursing informaticians are also contributing to different health initiatives by enhancing nursing education with information technology. For this reason, I realized that our organization would benefit from this type of role because, during the pandemic, nursing technologies would be in demand; therefore, we will increase customer satisfaction and profits.
Firstly, nursing informatics is an area in nursing that mainly aims for practice and integrates nurses’ knowledge and information with computer sciences to maintain medical data and improve the overall care for patients. Therefore, nurse informatics plays a vital role in nurse education and nursing technologies. As a consequence of nurse informatics, several technology fields evolved, such as medical records, which influence test results, nursing notes, and progress notes (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). Nursing informatics helps collect and retain information about a patient more effectively and develops care protocols based on new technological advances. What is more, computer programs help in providing high-quality, secure health care.
Moreover, the nurse informaticist’s role is to develop better communication between the patient and the nurse. They also serve as educators, designers of system technologies, researchers, assistants of transferring the techniques, and software engineers, which is also helpful in increasing nursing efficiency (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). The nurse informaticist helps in accessing the medical histories of patients promptly, providing lab results, and imaging them, which allows the other medical teams to get a correct diagnosis. This is a tremendous help, and it gives physician teams time resources to get a full image of a patient’s overall condition in a couple of seconds, which is essential in health care. In the medical field, speed means a lot, and that is why the position of the nurse informaticist will be a tremendous boost in our company’s efficiency. It will help us to provide the best possible care in the times of pandemic and also after it ends.
To prove my point, I would like to mention other healthcare organizations’ experiences with nurse informaticists. In March of 2017, nurse informaticist vastly improved Carolina’s healthcare system (Davis, 2017). Its healthcare tried to implement a three-year optimization plan to reduce the amount of time spent on patient care and improve the quality of the informational organization. They used an outdated Center technology for about a decade, which needed to be upgraded or replaced. Furthermore, when they have done the necessary changes, they significantly reduced the amount of documentation by removing duplicate records and creating an overall user-friendly system, which took about fifty percent less time to learn (Davis, 2017). This is why it was essential to develop the position of nurse informaticist in our department.
Carolinas Healthcare permanently reduced continuance of documentation checks by twenty percent, which increased the time nurses spend on patient care. They have also experienced a vast improvement in distributing medicine, which eliminated a good portion of tedious nursing work (Davis, 2017). Not only did nurses of that city become more content with their workflow, but the nurse informaticist also improved the quality of each assessment, which increased annual cost savings by a significant amount. With the nurse informaticist’s help, we will also be better at identifying patients with a high risk of deteriorating conditions. Nurses often overlook people suffering from deteriorating conditions because there are no external signs that they could be in a bad physical state. That is why nursing informaticist is needed in our organization.
An informaticist nurse leader aids in identifying and ensuring the patient’s safety by interacting with other leaders and helping them organize and increase care for the people in their custody. They also interact with the rest of the nursing staff via learning because the nurse informaticists tend to teach younger generations (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). Informaticists usually try to explain the technological advances implemented in the nurse work. They typically provide training and teach others by using data to locate different organizational issues. What is more, they usually consult others to find the best solution to eliminate existing problems. Furthermore, they also aid in providing a definitive diagnosis through existing electronic records.
As written earlier, thoroughly engaging nurses in healthcare technology would have a significant impact on patient care. The nursing technologies reduce the time nurses are obligated to spend on documentary or other menial chores and increase the time nurses spend on actual patient care (Lin et al., 2016). Therefore, nursing technicians would not only aid in customer satisfaction but sometimes would even save lives, especially in the times of COVID-19 (Suleman et al., 2020). Furthermore, more developed healthcare technologies would affect security, confidentiality, and privacy because the nurse informaticists work to achieve maximum safety in those fields. It would save a copious amount of money and shorten the tedious work nurses were obligated to do. It would return a significant amount of investments in three or fewer months.
For the rest of the nursing teams, the addition of a nurse informaticist would serve as a daunting challenge. They would have to learn new techniques in nursing care and improve their knowledge in new and advanced technologies. That would be difficult; however, it could also mean that there should be more professional nurses and more exceptional care for patients. What is more, collaboration with interdisciplinary teams would also be beneficial because an increase in care time will significantly reduce human errors and improve work quality. Technologies will not only aid with documentary but also help to deduct the current state of a patient. In the medical field, speed is crucial, and that is why this addition would only be a benefit for our company. By reducing the damage to human errors, we would be able to hire more staff and make more educating programs dedicated to nursing. Mitigating human error injuries is also a prerogative of the nursing informaticist because they usually create programs to improve the overall medical performance of different teams.
To conclude my presentation, I would like to mention several essential points of my proposal. Because of the recent outbreak of COVID-19, it is crucial to improve the company’s performance by creating the position of the nurse informaticist. First of all, it will increase nurses’ productivity by shortening the time they are obligated to spend on the documentary and other tedious chores. Secondly, it will vastly improve the speed and quality of nursing care, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce the risks of the death of critical patients. Finally, it will significantly reduce the costs of health care and save our company a large amount of money in the long run.
References
Davis, J. (2017). How nursing informatics helped Carolinas HealthCare eliminate 18 million clicks. Healthcare IT news. Web.
Lin, H.C., Chiou, J.Y., Chend, C.C., & Yang, C.W. (2016). Understanding the impact of nurses’ perception and technological capability on nurses’ satisfaction with nursing information system usage: A holistic perspective of alignment. ScienceDirect, 57, 143-152. Web.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K.G. (2015). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Suleman, A., Bautista, J. R., Block, L. J., Lee, J. J., Lozada-Perezmitre, E., Nibber, R., O’Connor, S., Peltonen, L.-M., Ronquillo, C., Tayaben, J., Thilo, Friederilke J. S., & Topaz, M. (2020). A nursing informatics response to COVID‐19: Perspectives from five regions of the world. Wiley Online Library. Web.