Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! | 2021
Tracking the impact of nursing informatics
Abstract
www.NursingMadeIncrediblyEasy.com January/February 2021 Nursing made Incredibly Easy! 49 Today’s healthcare environment relies on nurses to deliver and manage care while keeping patients safe. Nurses need timely, accurate, and accessible data and information to make the right decisions to improve patient outcomes. Communication is an essential tool and nurses need appropriate access to patient information, including medical histories, medication lists, lab and imaging results, and clinician notes, to understand a patient’s clinical status. Much of our current communication is in an electronic format, which requires new skills to ensure that health information is accurate, easy to use and understand, and accessible whenever and wherever it’s needed. Nurse informaticists play an essential role in the design and use of health information technology (IT), including devices that enable clinicians to track data and deliver safe and efficient care. According to the American Nurses Association, nursing informatics is the specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage, and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice. The contribution of nurse informaticists in developing and improving technology, such as electronic medical records (EMRs) and clinical decision support (CDS), is essential for reducing medical errors, patient care delays, and healthcare costs. The expanding use of health IT and devices has led to new career opportunities, including the specialty of nursing informatics. Building on the foundation of the nursing process, informatics nurses apply their understanding of IT to assist the healthcare team in managing data and assimilating increasingly complex information to achieve the desired outcomes. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is a nonprofit professional society whose mission is to reform the global health ecosystem through the power of information and technology. HIMSS sponsors a vibrant nursing informatics community, which has grown to represent over 8,000 nurse informaticists, working in a wide variety of roles and settings. These roles build on functional areas that require informatics skills, including education, leadership and administration, consultation, systems analysis and design, policy development, quality and performance improvement, research, and evaluation. Tracking the impact of nursing informatics