The healthcare industry receives immense data daily, which needs to be sorted and categorized. The way technology has made work easier for other sectors has also seeped into the healthcare industry. Technology has made it easier to collect, analyze and use data effectively, streamlining how healthcare services are provided to the patients.
Better management of resources means more significant utilization of such resources and an upgraded healthcare system, making it easier for patients to find the right treatment. This process of managing medical data through technology is health informatics.
Nurses have greatly benefited from health informatics. Nurses receive a massive influx of patient data every day, to which they need to provide their services. Informatics has made it easier for nurses to access all relevant data about their patients, provide them with sufficient attention, and effectively communicate with them.
Why Is Informatics Important For Nursing Practice?
Informatics has reshaped many standard practices and procedures so that the healthcare system can become more efficient and cost-effective for the healthcare industry. The ways it has improved the health care system is:
- Improved Accessibility.
Nurses need to access patient's information at all times. This information includes medical histories, a list of their medications, lab results, and test results. It also has a record of notes made by physicians. Nurses need to make decisions and know precisely what treatment the patient needs to undergo. Accessible information also helps nurses provide the relevant healthcare to readmitted patients more efficiently and effectively as their information is readily available. This way, they can bypass unnecessary tests and medicines and stick to one informed route of treatment.
- Easy To Read Information.
Doctors and lab technicians often write information in illegible writing, which can be hard to read and takes time to decipher. This information is crucial to a patient's health and cannot be ignored as it jeopardizes their safety. The advanced technology makes it easier for the machine to pick up extract the information. Nursing informatics removes this hassle to eliminate any transcription inaccuracies. It makes it easier to prepare patient's medications. The program also informs nurses about the patient's allergens and stops them from making duplicate orders.
- It Improves Healthcare Technology.
Healthcare technology is rapidly advancing. It removes the barriers to communication. Effective communication is vital for the patient's safety, and proper dialoguing helps establish the right diagnosis. Nursing informatics has developed electronic batch records, making them accessible over a device with logs and other healthcare practitioners. Computerized information reduces medical errors, provides immediate care to patients, and reduces the cost of maintaining paper records that are hard to organize.
- Coordination.
Nurse Informatics helps in tracking the workflow, which identifies the weak points in a system. Through this data tracking, hospitals ensure they are staffed adequately. The patient-to-nurse ratio is optimal. Whenever the need occurs, it is necessary to hire more healthcare practitioners without disrupting the flow. It also plays a role in employees' welfare as they get sufficient rest in between shifts and are not loaded with work.
It can be seen that Informatics is dedicated to the healthcare system. At the same time, they are improving how a hospital functions. A nurse informaticist has several other responsibilities to fulfill along with developing the technology.
What Are the Responsibilities of an Informaticist?
Nurse informaticist balance many roles from which two of the primary jobs are to develop technological resources, train the staff in using this technology, and evaluate the progress they've made with it. Their spectrum of responsibility also includes.
- Designing and testing new systems to gauge their compatibility.
- Assessing what the healthcare industry needs immediately and initiating those projects right away.
- Educating and staff training and becoming a resource for the staff whenever they have a question or need help.
- Recognize the technical errors which may appear and have appeared and remedy them.
- Helping the staff transition to advanced programs to use them right away and incorporate them immediately.
- They are also project managers and ensure organizations comply with the defined medical laws when using new technological advances.
It is an outline of the many responsibilities informaticist shoulders. They are becoming increasingly essential in this digitized era. Hospitals must hire and work with qualified and trained informaticists as quickly as possible.
Any nurse with a clinical background is well suited for this job. Their experience, work, and patient interaction make them perfect for working with the patient's data. To achieve this promotion in their work, a nurse must obtain a master's degree in health informatics, which will provide them with the relevant skills and training to become an informaticist
Wrap Up
As the healthcare sector is slowly evolving, traditional nursing practices are getting outdated. It is only occurring because as the world's population is expanding, catering to this growth with no automation would have been tedious and not to mention impossible.
Informatics has also opened more career opportunities for nurses. They are no longer limited to just working with patients in the practical field. Still, they can now work with data and numbers while rendering their services in other ways.
Nurses interact and engage with patients the most. Doctors and other health care practitioners are depending on their medical charts and data collection to treat patients. This chain of command must work smoothly, or else the entire healthcare system will crumble.
It is one of the reasons why technological advancements should impact nurses right away. Ease and efficiency in their job is encouraging for them and keeps the workflow optimum. It is why sectors are involved in developing machines and data collection methods.
Informatics is a valuable addition to medical healthcare. It has made the exchange of information and tracking of medical records easier. It has elevated the work pressure of the various health care practitioners as they work in unison in delivering their services to the patients.
