The Future of Nursing Informatics

  
Today’s healthcare environment continually places increasing demands on nurses to communicate, share data, and synthesize information through the use of information systems, with or without the assistance of computers (Chapman et al., 1994; Ngin and Simms, 1996). In addition to having knowledge of information systems, nurses who are computer literate have the opportunity to use the power and efficiency of computer systems to play an important role in enhancing patient care delivery, offering safe care, and shaping nursing practice. In July 2004, Dr. Charles Safran, President of the American Medical Informatics Association, announced at the National Health Information Infrastructure Conference inWashington,DCthat 6000 informatics nurses would be needed to support patient care delivery in the United States.

 

In the near future, I would like to see myself being able to use advanced nursing gadgets like handheld medicine scanning system imbedded in a handheld computer (I saw a prototype of this one in COX Hospital), to walk around the floor taking care of my patients with blue-tooth-like (hands-free) equipment on my ear so I don’t have to answer the hand held phone while doing dressing changes.  How about being able to see my patient’s face ( and vice versa) on the computer screen when he/she pushes the call button? It would be nice if there is an alert to my phone or the nurse’s assistant phone if my patient pushes the call button.  How about eye scanners instead of ID badge swipes?  I can imagine myself doing patient teaching in the patient’s room using multi-media, and for the doctors too.  Most of the time the doctors use the white board or scratch paper to explain surgical procedures done to patients.  It would be nice to get patient assignment summaries that would give us complete, accurate and relevant data about our patient assignments, that is on top of verbal reports.

  Because health care providers mainly communicate with one another through comments on patient charts, a nursing informaticist continually strives to improve the accuracy, timeliness, and speed of patient charting. With better quality patient charts, the various health care professionals are able to make better choices concerning a patient’s care.Therefore, the goal is to find ways to enhance and simplify documentation using the latest information and computer technologies. Nursing informatics enables patient records to be updated with handheld devices, voice recognition, computers, and other tools. This is far more efficient than having to handwrite notes on each patient’s chart. It also eliminates a lot of unnecessary work and facilitates easier analysis of data.