Nursing Informatics: The future of Nurse Informatics

Nursing informatics has become a critical part of our healthcare system

Nursing informatics is a nursing science which combines analytics, and information science to help manage and share vital healthcare data. Its main aim is to promptly provide clinicians with accurate patient data to enhance patient-centered care and outcomes.

Nursing informatics helps improve vital nursing processes like documentation, which is an important aspect of the profession and essential for effective patient care. Before electronic health records (EHRs), nurses recorded patient information on charts. Today, nursing informatics simplifies documentation and automates the transmission of patient data via connected devices to provide access by nurses, physicians, and patients.

What does a nursing informatics specialist do? 

1. Implementing and managing health information systems: Nursing Informatics are responsible for the implementation, maintenance, and optimization of EHRs and other health information systems. They ensure that these systems meet clinical needs and comply with regulatory requirements. 
2. Training and support: They provide training and ongoing support to healthcare staff on how to use health information systems effectively. This includes creating training materials, conducting workshops, and offering one-on-one support. 
3. Data analysis and reporting: Nursing Informatics analyze clinical data to identify trends, improve processes, and support clinical decision-making. They generate reports that help healthcare organizations monitor performance and identify areas for improvement. 
4. Policy development: They participate in developing policies and procedures related to health information management, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations and standards. 
5. Research and development: Nursing Informatics engage in research to explore new technologies and informatics practices that can further enhance patient care and nursing practice. 

Essential Skills required for a nursing informatics specialist? 

1. Clinical expertise: A strong background in nursing practice is crucial, as it provides the foundational knowledge needed to understand and address clinical needs effectively. 
2. Technical proficiency: Nursing Informatics must be proficient in health information technology, including EHR systems, data management tools, and software applications relevant to healthcare. 
3. Analytical skills: Successfully analyzing data and extracting meaningful insights is important. Nursing Informatics need to interpret complex data sets and generate reports that inform clinical and administrative decision-making. 
4. Communication skills: Effective communication is essential for training staff, collaborating with healthcare team members, and conveying complex technical information in an understandable way. 
5. Problem-solving skills: Nursing Informatics often encounter challenges related to system implementation and data management. Strong problem-solving skills enable them to identify issues, develop solutions, and implement them effectively. 
6. Attention to detail: Accuracy is critical in managing health information and ensuring data integrity. Nursing Informatics must be meticulous in their work to maintain high standards of data quality and compliance. 

Benefits, challenges, and implications of selected digital technologies in nursing

1. Artificial Intelligence / Big Data

Benefits: Use in decision support systems can improve the identification of infections in pandemics/outbreaks by utilizing AI and big data analytics for contact tracing and population health response.

Challenges: The bias of datasets is currently being embedded into AI algorithms, causing a drop in nursing participation in their development.

Future Implications: AI based nursing in acute and primary care needs research. Policies needed on professional accountability.
Educational and leadership competencies and opportunities related to AI and data analytics

2. Automation technologies (eg, robotics, drones)

Benefits: Robots can support people with cognitive, sensory, and motor impairments; help those who are ill or injured; support caregivers; and aid the clinical workforce.

Challenges: Technologists, researchers, providers, and users must collaborate to ensure success.

Future Implications: Emerging innovations coupling AI and robotics will have intended and unintended changes to nursing practice and its professional culture
Nursing must assist in co-designing and developing these solutions to be complementary to practice.

3. Assisted Living / Smart Home Technologies

Benefits: Motion sensing and monitoring systems can help tailor care choices for elderly individuals in their households who are suffering from memory issues.

Challenges: Identifying appropriate devices is difficult due to the diversity and rotation of technologies, which leads to privacy concerns as well as technical and cost obstacles.

Future Implications: Nurses should actively participate in designing, developing, and implementing systems in collaboration with patients and caregivers.

4. Clinical Decision Support Systems

Benefits: These systems have the aptitude to recognize contagious illnesses and initiate proper care responses.

Challenges: Excessive notifications for medical professionals can lead to alert fatigue and the need for alternate solutions due to insufficient research on their impact and effectiveness in certain clinical settings, such as emergency departments.

Future Implications: Incorporate nurses in designing, developing, and implementing systems that enhance decision-making and workflow without causing disruptions by taking usability into account.

5. EHRs

Benefits: Surpass paper documentation in terms of data completeness, structure, and legibility. 

Challenges: Any shortcomings in the quantity or quality of the documented data are due to time constraints or a lack of proper system design

Future Implications: Nursing leadership must refurbish EHRs to lessen the burdens of documentation.

6. Mobile Health

Benefits: Guiding patients through apps can enhance immediate results. Moreover, with mobile health, patients and providers can keep in touch and regularly update.

Challenges: There are worries regarding the cost and dependability of mobile apps for clinical guidance and nurses’ apprehensions about their professional image when using apps, especially in hospitals.

Future Implications: Guidelines and a professional work culture supporting the usage of mobile devices in clinical practices need to be developed and incorporated with EHRs and other correlated technologies when required.

7. Telehealth / Telemedicine

Benefits: Time-saving aids in the optimization of all healthcare services while raising the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

Challenges: More adequate technical abilities are needed, and nurses’ pessimistic views about telemedicine and their suspicions about privacy and data security might delay its adoption.

Future Implications: Nurses and caretakers must assist patients in co-creating telehealth systems and new virtual care.

8. Personalized Precision Healthcare

Benefits: Creating treatment plans specific to each patient allows nurses to provide care that is customized to their unique needs.

Challenges: The speed of technological advancements and concerns about fair access to technology could hinder progress.

Future Implications: Nurses must push for equal access for patients and families to their heredity-based health data.

9. Social Media & Online Information

Benefits: Diverse pools of health information facilitate nursing processes and support patient and student education.

Challenges: Quality and reliability of online health information, particularly on social media, varies, and it can be risky or unsafe.

Future Implications: Nurses should be educated about appropriate use of social media and online health information and support patients’ use of these technologies to improve their self-management.

10. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

Benefits: VR training is effective for enhancing understanding in nursing education and can be utilized as a treatment tool or for clinical intervention in both pediatric and adult populations.

Challenges: Can cause simulation sicknesses, such as light headedness and vision difficulties, might occur.

Future Implications: Nurses and educators should be active participants in the creation of inexpensive devices and software that are compatible with current mobile, internet, and digital technologies.

The future of Nursing Informatics:

• Include nursing workflow as a focus of healthcare IT funding to ensure that systems and devices will enable nurses to be more efficient and produce safer care.
• Advocate for nurses to be included in technology design and evaluation to enhance rapid adoption.
• Ensure that nurses are seen as meaningful users of technology.
• Support nurses in moving high-technology care into the hospital setting of the future—the home and community

REFERENCES

1. American Nurses Association. Nursing Informatics: Scope and Standards of Practice. Silver Spring, MD; 2022.
2. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2021.
3. Booth RG, Strudwick G, McBride S, O’Connor S, Solano López AL. How the nursing profession should adapt for a digital future. BMJ. 2021 Jun 14;373:n1190. doi: 10.1136/bmj.n1190. PMCID: PMC8201520.
4. Hess S, Alper C. Nursing Informatics: The Vital Nursing Link Between Technology And Patient Care. HCA Healthc J Med. 2024 Oct 1;5(5):513-516. doi: 10.36518/2689-0216.2003. PMID: 39524944; PMCID: PMC11547278. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11547278/

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