D029 informatics for transforming nursing care cem 1 task 1
D029 informatics for transforming nursing care cem 1 task 1
Informatics is no longer an option for nurses and other health care providers. It is a requirement. “The nation is at a tipping point in applying enabling technologies to health care … the time has come for health care to leave the manual tools of the past in the past.”1 When nurses and the nursing profession are discussed, one of the first words to come to mind is the word “caring,” which may seem the antithesis of technology. As nursing informaticists, we believe otherwise and look to the current drive for health care reform as an opportunity “to affect aspects of care that nurses have valued throughout history: coordinating care across the continuum, attention to prevention of disease and health promotion, attention to the role of the family and community, and empowering the voices of the patients (now clients/consumers/customers) in their own care.
Healthcare informatics is a discipline focused on the management of electronic health records and information systems. Equipped with up-to-date information technology, medical facilities and life sciences businesses fulfill the technical requirements to securely handle enormous amounts of sensitive data.
The resulting insights can keep facilities running at their best and guide leadership toward long-term improvements. Healthcare informaticists may uncover findings that serve to prevent the spread of disease in a population, promote treatment adherence, coordinate care among multiple specialists and ensure an organization’s compliance with all relevant privacy regulations and policies. However, each of the many roles that keep a healthcare organization functioning, from doctors to administrators, may benefit most from different types of quantitative information and varied approaches to organization, analysis and visualization.
Clinical Informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing, medical, clinical science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in our patient care and informatics practice. This specialized informatics practice is essential to the delivery of high quality, and cost-effective health care in a fast-paced environment where technology is ubiquitous.
