Isabel is a 29-year old nursing informaticist a Mercy-Works Medical Cottage, a 217-bed hospital situated in Bozeman Montana. She has been working at the hospital for three years. It is at the same institution where she completed her internship. As an informatics specialist, Isabel ensures efficient management of patient and nursing data, bridging the gap between patient nursing information and the busy nurse routines at the hospitals. She documents patient data, analyzes arising trends monitors and consistent errors and mistakes and gives guidelines on the way forward on places where nursing intervention and informational boost is necessary. Above those, she illustrates how her job also entails researching, formulating and implementing more efficient data systems further to refine nursing practices and patient outcomes at the hospital. She works closely with the health information management department, as she relies on their data sometimes.
Her work with advanced technology also requires her to routinely apply evidence-based research data to technological data management and utilization, while guiding the hospital on what technical steps need to be taken in the field of health informatics. On a typical day, she will track the success of various quality initiatives, analyze the statistics of clinical interventions at the hospital, test and verify various systems and write policies. The qualify for this role, first, she had to be a Registered Nurse. She then undertook a healthcare administration and informatics course. She also states that her colleague underwent on-the-job training to attain a similar level, even though that might take longer. According to her, other skills necessary for the job include strong interpersonal skills, clinical expertise, innovative thinking, technological knowhow and leadership experience. It is such competencies that make her job both enjoyable and easily manageable.
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How this Role Affects Patient Safety
Her view on the role of informatics on patient safety and quality of care is that information is everything. She considers her role to be the binding factor between nursing interventions and patient needs, as she can design interventions that specifically target pressing issues and bring about health improvement. Technology is dependent on information processing; therefore, quality information is as important as a nursing intervention in healthcare today. She describes one ward was being associated with constant nosocomial breathing difficulties for their patients before she joined the hospital. He reviews of the health records showed her that the issue started three years ago, and at least three patients developed breathing complication in the surgical ward, without a similar occurrence in the other wards. The other nurses had assumed that it was just the patient illness, but she intended to get to the bottom of it all. Three weeks into the exercise, she discovered that fumes from the hospital's generator rose towards the ward's ventilation shaft. She addressed the issue and solved it completely. As such, her role as a nursing informaticist is vital to patient safety.
Above those, Isabel describes herself as the hospital's "problem hunter," where she troubleshoots the hospital's nursing systems and information management infrastructure to uncover any weaknesses and address them in time. She ensures that the privacy and confidentiality of patient data are upheld and that the storage and retrieval are conducive and practical for the nurses. Above those, as the informaticist, she ascertains proper usage of the information. Finally, Isabel tracks various nursing interventions, observing their impact on patient recovery and illustrating how, why and where they work. This role is critical to improvement in healthcare provision practices and health improvement.
Human Factors and Other Challenges Faced in the Role
The main challenge in fulfilling this job is working with huge amounts of patient data, tracking it over time and ensuring its proper utilization. Isabel analyzes most patient cases and offers nursing guidance, where she sees a gap in the healthcare provision. She also has to work in collaboration with the health information management department, whose role is to record, store and at times, retrieve patient data. She has to do this without looking competitive, authoritative or interruptive as the two are very different department, each with its roles. Some of her roles also entail reprimanding and guiding those responsible for entry and storage of patient data when they are not keen on the privacy and confidentiality aspects of patient data.
Spending too much time with computers can be hectare as well, as most of what she does is analytical, confirmatory and consultative. She can sit at her desk the whole day, with minimal work entailing actual encounter with patients and other nurses. Even though she likes and respects her job also, she says that sometimes it can be very dull, and contrary to the actual nursing work, which she is very passionate about. As the observer of all what her fellow nurses do, she is sometimes forced to confront, correct, reprimand and even warn nurses when they make mistakes or demonstrate recklessness. It is such circumstances that make her job more challenging.
Insights Gained from the Interview.
A lot of insight into the nursing informatics job was gained from this interview; first, it became clear that this job is not the same as the one done by the hospital information management department. Health informatics depends on the clinical insights of a nurse, technical computer skills and analytical capabilities (Sharma, Devi, & Sharma, 2020). One has to do more analysis and decision making that a nurse, who only has to dedicate all his or her attention to a particular patient. It also became clear that informatics entails more diverse roles than those of a nurse, as one has to work with many more other professionals and test standards of practice and characters of various other nurses.
Through the interview, it was very insightful to learn that a nurse informaticist has a higher educational qualification than a registered nurse. One has not only to be qualified and experienced as a registered nurse but also one who is well conversant with analytics, leadership and critical thinking. A nurse informaticist is one who is allowed and even required to question and critique every nursing intervention, piece of information and standard being practiced. The interview also provided some vital insight into the importance of healthcare information in the pursuit of a healthier society.
AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators and JC's Patient Safety Goals
The patient safety goals and safety indicators are just critical factors that are indicative of the kind of healthcare being availed by a healthcare organization to the patients it serves. The indicators usually are quick to pick up any shortcomings on the type of care being provided. In contrast, the goals give the nurses milestones in patient safety that should be pursued. These universal standards make a level field for the entirety of the healthcare field, such that when every healthcare organization follow them, the profession is defined universally. Such milestones give the hospital a direction, facilitating better healthcare provision and sustaining productivity in healthcare.
In my clinical setting, the patient safety indicators are referred to as the markers of quality care. They give an overall image of a nurse's performance. For example, if a patient develops pressure ulcers to have fallen t the hospital, the issue has been further investigated to identify the cause and apply appropriate corrective measures. The hospital has invested heavily on assets and skills to satisfy all the patient safety indicators. In return, the hospital has minimal cases of patient negligence of low quality of care such as insufficiency in healthcare attendants, and even patient accidents. It would be impossible to ascertain the quality of care without the AHRQ indicators (Darvish et al., 2014). More importantly, the indicators provide a basis for the hospital's continuous improvement program, where it pursues progress with each day.
Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER)
The TIGER program yielded several critical areas of nursing informatics as a way of integrating nursing care with evidence-based data for more refinement. Among these key areas is the integration of nursing informatics into lifelong learning initiatives (Al-Hawamdih, & Ahmad, 2018). The institution where Isabel works pursue this level of integration, where it aims to make nursing informatics an integral part of nursing. It also pursues other avenues of an interprofessional and interdisciplinary approach in healthcare. According to the interviewee, the TIGER initiative empowers them to attain highly technological and patient-centered care that is relevant to the current technological trends of the 21st Century. The industry also ensures that the nurse informatics developments are sustainable, impactful and pursuable in the amidst the pursuit of other nursing goals (O'Connor et al., 2017). Over time, the TIGER initiative has proven to be very effective in increasing educational opportunities by formulating a model for open access to e-health training programs for society.
References
Al-Hawamdih, S., & Ahmad, M. M. (2018). Examining the relationship between nursing informatics competency and the quality of information processing. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing , 36 (3), 154-159.
Darvish, A., Bahramnezhad, F., Keyhanian, S., & Navidhamidi, M. (2014). The role of nursing informatics on promoting quality of health care and the need for appropriate education . Global journal of health science, 6( 6), 11.
O'Connor, S., Hubner, U., Shaw, T., Blake, R., & Ball, M. (2017). Time for TIGER to ROAR! Technology informatics guiding education reform .
Sharma, K., Devi, S. D., & Sharma, B. (2020). The Role of Nursing Informatics in Healthcare Sector. Journal of Critical Reviews , 7(10), 1364-1369.
