Introduction to Nursing Informatics

Chapter 1. Introduction to Nursing Informatics

Origin of healthcare informatics

     For decades, in healthcare, the increase in knowledge has led to the development of many specialties and subspecialties. It is a new knowledge domain of computer and information science, engineering and technology in all fields of health and medicine, including research, education and practice. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tool include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, and (bio)medical research. There are many data that can't be easily understood if not merged and analyzed thoroughly using only the data that we have and the knowledge that we already have. This led to the development of healthcare informatics.

Nightingale emphasized documenting health

     In the mid 1800s, Florence Nightingale used a documentation system in the way of how to treat wounded soldiers in the Crimean war. She documented every interventions and outcomes to compare them and pick out the best interventions to apply. She was known and recognized as the first public health informaticist.






Nurses have serious problems in the workplace.


     With this unending development of our technologies, we already have many new devices that nurses use. Thus, healthcare teams faces challenges in learning this new devices on how to use them for the sake of treating people. the top 4 problems of local nurses in the workplace are:

1.) Documentation time is excessive.
     With nurses caring 10 patients or more at a time, it is difficult and takes time to make a documentation for them. So, majority of the nurse's time is eaten up in facing the computer to document than having conversations to the patients.

2.) Turnaround time is too long.
     The request that was made is accomplished in an unideal time. This is because procedures or laboratory tests are long, this may be because of overworked hospital aides who carry out order slips. Even with the availability of modern equipment, there will still be a delay because of the large volume of results that needs to be read.


3.) Nursing processes are inaccurate.
     Even if modern equipments are available in assisting nurses to care for the patients, errors are still committed. Medication errors runs first, second is labeling errors and common are wrong entries, dictation, translation and transcription of orders of information. Automation of these processes leads to reduction of errors.


4.) Communication is poor.
     Communication is poor when between healthcare providers and between departments uses telephone, this is because it requires for both parties to be present. Another disadvantage would be telephones can be tapped or bugged when security systems are breached. So computers provide different modes of communication like videoconferencing, chat, email or text-messaging which is more convenient and appropriate.

     




Automation can save nurses because automation largely reducts paper works, shortening turnaround times, improvement of accuracy of nursing processes and eliminates time consuming and redundant processes.