Transcription
[Music] Hi, my name is Rose Janini, and I'm a graduate student at Duke University studying nursing informatics. My goal today is that you will understand more about what a nursing informatics specialist does. Please join me as I interview a few people and find out what they think it is.
Nursing informatics is a nurse who—I kind of see her as a liaison between information technology and real nursing. Um, it is the registered nurse who has a lot of clinical background and knows the policies and procedures of the workings of a nurse, with the information technology um, backgrounds. I think it's how nurses gather and record information, to store it and help improve patient healthcare. According to me, it would be the gathering of a person's health history and um, keeping a record of it for all their life.
The American Nurses Association's definition of nursing informatics is that it is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice. And this next model clearly shows informatics at the intersection of each—each of those sciences.
Here are some of the concepts of nursing informatics. Informatics nurses are involved in development, support, and evaluation of applications, tools, processes, and structures that help nurses to manage data. You can find these nurses in clinical practice, education, consultation, research, and administration.
I offer a comparison here. Nurses use information and technology to support a specific domain of practice, whereas informatics nurses support change, expand, and transform practice by the design and implementation of information technology. The overall goal of nursing informatics is to improve the health of populations, communities, families, and individuals by optimizing information management and communication.
I'm Dr. Sharon Sweeney Fee, and I first got involved with electronic records in, oh, probably 1998. My Master's Degree was in nursing systems and informatics out of the University of Arizona. My doctorate degree is in nursing systems and vulnerable populations. There was not much more than Master's preparation for in—into informatics when I got that degree in 2001. The training I received from the University of Arizona was very um, heavy on imp—informatics theory, implementation theory, uh, the human um, technology interface. How many times does a nurse have to click a mouse? How many data um, points does, for example, an ICU nurse have to process in a day? And it's somewhere around a million if you're in a um, standard ICU. So how—how do we make those processing easier? How do we make that work better for the nurse?
I was involved in the rewriting of the scope and standards for nurse informatic specialists, and that talks about there's the nurse that interacts with technology, and you're not to find a nurse in practice that doesn't interact with some form of technology, whether it be an IV pump or an electronic thermometer to a full integrated electronic chart. So there's varying levels of and degrees, but the nurse informatics specialist is the person that understands the theory, understands the implementation, project management, understands the way to evaluate outcomes, whether I'm asking the nurse how is that interfaced with the commuter—working computer working for her versus asking the system how efficient is this implementation. And there are two things that can occur at the same time, but they're on very different levels, and the informatics um, specialist understands that.
In rewriting the scope and standards and looking at the future, the thing we really understood is the document we're writing; we have no way to predict what the future will hold in technology. There's vast amounts of research being done, and so what we had to do was try—try and write a document that would talk about the role of the nurse informaticist as somebody that really has to reach across the bridge in between the clinical world and the technology world. And we really are the person um, that communicates with both arenas. We have to have a solid clinical understanding; we have to—have a solid technology understanding, and we have to be able to speak to both of those groups who frequently speak very different languages. And how can we bridge that?
And uh, my personal goal with the future of informatics is that um, a lot of the talk now is about we're going to create a more efficient healthcare system with information technology, but nobody says how we're going to make that more efficient. If you think of banking and you have one of the large banks that you may have a mortgage and a checking account, you can't go to the checking account and tell them I need to redo some work on my mortgage frequently; you have to go to another office—that's their mortgage office—because they've just layered system upon system upon system. If we do that in the health environment, we're going to have that same situation that I had years ago where I had four separate electronic charts to look at what was the process of care for a patient.
I think the key thing in the future, we have to really make sure that we're interfacing all of our systems, that we're creating seamless systems. HL7 was something that they used to—where the basic language works on that—but we still don't have a strong seamless interface system. That's going to be one of the big issues, and I think nurse informaticists need to keep at the front of the debate that this is not about billing efficiency; it's about improving patient care and improving practice—both nurses, physicians, therapists, everyone that deals with the patient. The more we have at our fingertips of what is going on with that patient, the better we're going to be able to take care of that patient.
Well, I hope this short video has helped your understanding of nursing informatics, and thank you for joining me. [Music] [Applause]