NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics In Health Care JJ

Nursing Informatics in Health Care

Information technology is changing the face of many healthcare organizations worldwide. With incorporation of new and advanced technology and informatics, healthcare providers are able to access and analyse information more accurately. In this report, my job as a professional nurse is to attend a Nurses Association’s meeting at Minneapolis, Minnesota and conduct a presentation on my role to describe the impact of informatics on positive patient and organizational outcomes. Since our healthcare organization is embracing the technological advancements; I believe that my role can benefit the organization if I pursue proposing a nurse informatics role in the organization to create a new nurse informatics position. After speaking my intentions to the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) and the Human Resources (HR) Manager, this report is prepared that comprises an evidence-based proposal to support the new nursing informatics role in the organization. This report is crucial because it can help decision-makers make an informed decision as to whether the addition of such a role could justify the return on investment (ROI).

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The Role of Nursing Informatics in Healthcare Organizations

Health informatics is having a significant impact on nursing practices across the globe. Since the holistic mission of nurses is to ensure patient’s wellbeing, informatics can strongly influence the daily tasks and goals of these professionals. For instance, according to   Goodman (2020), nursing informatics can help healthcare professionals to give special attention to communication, access, and accuracy of patients’ data in a healthcare setting. Many recent researches believe that this rapidly changing profession of nursing has to keep up with the challenges of the modern world. As direct caregivers, nurses should use information technology according to the best practices to facilitate the work of other healthcare professionals and organizations (Goodman, 2020). Therefore, this means that many nursing challenges and issues can be solved using the information technology tools to achieve greater healthcare outcomes. Moreover, hospitals and clinicians are also interested in seriously reducing their costs amidst the global pandemic; using information and communication technologies is becoming a necessity and a pre-requisite to achieving positive patient outcomes.  NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

Nurse Informatics and Other Health Care Organizations 

After conducting research on competitor organizations in Minnesota, the data revels that Mayo Clinic and Fergus Falls both use nurses with informatics speciality. For example, Fergus Falls pays $47K – $97K salary to Clinical Systems Analysts who support the overall implementation, monitoring, and management of information systems in the healthcare settings. This nursing informatics interacts viably with the rest of the staff and interdisciplinary teams using in-house and remote collaboration tools. This position involves excellent communication skills between clinical departments and provides documentation in digital format (Goodman, 2020). This means that such nurses can train other staff members in HIS (Health information Systems) and other Microsoft Office products to enhance their efficiency.  NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

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Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology 

Fully engaging nurses in information technology can positive influence the patient care. For instance, a research by Antonio (2019) emphasizes the use of mobile devices, smart watches, and smart phones for supporting the monitoring of remotely accommodated patients and providing the best home care to them. Information technology has also influenced the nursing profession using documentation that has eliminated the need for paper work in hospitals to reduce the manual record-keeping hassle. The Electronic Health Records are keeping the patient’s history up-to-date nowadays. Due to widespread usage of IT informatics, nurses are able to quickly and efficiently use patient data to enhance their daily work activities. Therefore, using nursing informatics can make the vital information available to doctors, admin staff, and nurses hassle-free.

As the United States population becomes more diverse and thicker, people are focusing on using mobile devices that is also increasingly important in maintaining their medical records. The digital information unlike hard data can be carried anywhere without hassle. With digital patient history and data, patients can travel to any hospital and show nurses their current history and problem. Moreover, health informatics also allows nurses to track other staff members when they need them and measure their workflow. This enhances the inter-office communication of nurses and identifies areas where communication is lacking (Langarizadeh, 2017). Another scholarly research by Hübner (2016) states that in hospitals where nurse-to-patient ratio is low; nurses find challenges to deal with many patients needing immediate attention. In order to save patients from suffering in such conditions, nurses need help from informatics to reduce burnout and manage their workload efficiently. Since evidence-based practices are a vital component of nursing practice, using health informatics means nurses can determine the best practices and trending services to improve patient care outcomes. NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

Protected health information (security, privacy, and confidentiality) 

Within the US healthcare system, an important consideration for decision-makers is the understanding of protection and safety of healthcare information. Mostly, when scholars discuss information security of privacy in healthcare settings, they related it to HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) that ensures patients’ confidentiality of their information (Egbert, 2016). For example, Langarizadeh (2017) describes confidentiality as an obligation of healthcare professionals who have an access to patient’s records or communication to keep their private information safe. This obligation can also been observed in the American Health Information Management Association Code of Ethics that describes the right of a patient to privacy. This confidentiality doctrine is also acknowledged by laws in the US to create a good relationship between nurses and patients. Moreover, in terms of privacy, scholars define it separately from confidentiality as a right of a patient or a group to make vital decisions regarding sharing their personal information with other parties (Wilier, 2017). Again, HIPPA Privacy Law plays a vital role that helps to establish national standards for health and information privacy in the country. This implies that the privacy advocacy provides patients with some elements of control including a right to retrieve their own data and request nurses to amend it to provide the most accurate data.

Another important concept is security that is directly related to patient’s protection in a healthcare organization. For instance, in old days, the security concept was applied in paper form in locked file cabinets. As the use of health informatics and electronic health records increased, automatic patient billing became a widespread trend. Again, the HIPPA Security Rule provides national standards to help nurses protect patients’ vital information (Pantell, 2020). The HIPPA emphasises on safeguarding patients’ private information in a digital format that prohibits breaches of confidentiality and security.

Since the informatics specialists’ nurses earn more than average nurses, according to a research by Langarizadeh (2017), the average salary of an informatics nurse is $ 102,230 per year.  This means that an informatics nurse can earn up to $49.15 in one hour that is a great earning potential for these individuals to make a difference to an organization. Even though some critics may argue that hiring such nurses may increase wages expense of a hospital, however, the value they provide may supersede the costs incurred to hire and retain such skilled nurses. Therefore, the hospital should ope nursing informatics roles to professionals from a variety of backgrounds and improve their clinical workflows through nursing knowledge.

Opportunities and Challenges

The information technology nurses can collaborate with teams to implement and learn new technology and improve patient care outcomes organization-wide. For instance, these nurses can help to integrate their clinical as well as IT knowledge to solve the problem of knowledge gap in the hospital. As long as they have the expert knowledge of IT systems and databases, they can tackle most challenges such as database schema administration and design. Moreover, they can make a career change transition to move in as a healthcare informatics specialist instead of an average-rated nurse. With their existing medical skills, they can make a significant difference in a medical organization (Goodman, 2020).  NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

Although a career in health informative is lucrative and rewarding, it also comes with some challenges. For instance, nurses have to deal with data security challenges in health informatics because information stored in cloud servers can be vulnerable (Hübner,2016). Moreover, malware and viruses may also infect the laptops and systems of hospitals with patients’ information. Nurses should take care to protect their passwords and also face problems when they teach the use of tools to a nurse without IT background.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Nurses can have great career in informatics. They often have to work through various patient records using information technology. However, if some nurses are hired specifically for their information technology skills in a healthcare organization, they can focus their care on the integration of health informatics in clinical practices and help practitioners achieve better patient care outcomes. This means that there are several career options opened for information technology-savvy nurses such as clinical informatics specialists, clinical analysts, and clinical informatics coordinators. These roles are available at many modern healthcare facilities and organizations in America. These roles allow nurses to enhance their IT management and leadership skills. Therefore, the hospital must devise a policy to hire at least 30% nurses who are informatics-savvy to provide better healthcare outcomes (Egbert, 2016).  NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

Moreover, the sources of laws in the United States provide a great view of security, confidentiality, and privacy of patients’ personal information in a healthcare organization. Managing digital patient information throws unique challenges for nurses in hospital settings. As nurses collect more data daily, their challenges expand by using more mobile and IT devices. This means a better response to this information technology challenge is the right information governance in a hospital setting. For example, healthcare professionals must use strategic management of patient’s information and form policies and laws to ensure healthcare information security, confidentiality, and privacy. Since health information managers in various settings are highly qualified personnel, they should realize their vital role and act like information stewards instead of supervisors. This implies that healthcare managers and administrators must have a good knowledge of informatics laws and follow the guidelines to protect information of patients.

The bottom line is that the hospital should use nurses with informatics speciality to teach software expertise to other departments and administrators. The computer training they provide other staff can benefit the whole organization to ensure an optimal use of software such as Skype, Microsoft Office, or even the EHR. If nurses already have a good knowledge of IT, they can learn more from nursing informatics to learn more about information sytems and IT vendor management (Antonio, 2019). Finally, healthcare organization must set regulations to limit the use of mobile phones for saving patients’ information due to security issues. Moreover, every online system should be protected to save it from malware and malicious people.

References 

Antonio, M. G., Petrovskaya, O., & Lau, F. (2019). Content Summa-ries of Selected Best Papers for the 2020 IMIA Yearbook, Special Section on Ethics in Health Informatics. J Am Med Inform Assoc, 26(8).

Egbert, N., Thye, J., Schulte, G., Liebe, J. D., Hackl, W. O., Ammenwerth, E., & Hübner, U. (2016). An iterative methodology for developing national recommendations for nursing informatics curricula. In Exploring Complexity in Health: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach (pp. 660-664). IOS Press.

Goodman, K. W. (2020). Ethics in health informatics. Yearbook of medical informatics, 29(01), 026-031.

Hübner, U., Shaw, T., Thye, J., Egbert, N., Marin, H., & Ball, M. (2016). Towards an international framework for recommendations of core competencies in nursing and inter-professional informatics: the TIGER competency synthesis project. In Exploring Complexity in Health: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach (pp. 655-659). IOS Press.

Langarizadeh, M., Moghbeli, F., & Aliabadi, A. (2017). Application of ethics for providing telemedicine services and information technology. Medical Archives, 71(5), 351. NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 1 Nursing Informatics in Health Care JJ

Pantell, M. S., Adler-Milstein, J., Wang, M. D., Prather, A. A., Adler, N. E., & Gottlieb, L. M. (2020). A call for social informatics. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(11), 1798-1801.

Wiljer, D., & Thakur, A. (2017). Ethics, Obligations, and Health Informatics for Clinicians. In Health Professionals’ Education in the Age of Clinical Information Systems, Mobile Computing and Social Networks (pp. 111-127). Academic Press.