To the Nursing Administrator:
Standout patient treatment and drug prescription is a distinctive feature for established healthcare systems. In the recent past, cases of patients being subjected to harmful treatment or wrong prescription have been on the rise. Harmful treatment and prescription errors are fatal because they could worsen the health conditions of a patient (Hussey & Kennedy, 2015). Legal action could also be taken against nurses implicated in such unethical conducts. Medical errors are approximated to affect over one million people annually in the US. Examples of harmful treatment and prescription errors include wrong dosage, underdosing or overdosing and incomplete treatment of diseases or injuries. Such errors result from data recording errors, failure to communicate with the patient or other nurses and wrong use of medical equipment (Mamta, 2014). Nonetheless, nursing informatics could be used to solve all the aforementioned errors.
Nursing informatics blends nursing and computer science to manage and communicate information and knowledge in the nursing field. To reduce the risk of occurrence of harmful treatment and prescription errors, nurses can incorporate health informatics technologies in the health facilities (Hussey & Kennedy, 2015). Informatics technologies improve communication among the nurses and help in eliminating harmful treatment and prescription resulting from lack of communication (Mamta, 2014). Secondly, integrating informatics technologies in the facility will bolster the tracking of diagnostic information of patients. Consequently, information tracking will aid in reducing prescription errors because the necessary information needed by the nurses or clinicians is easily accessible. To modernize treatment and prescription, digital systems can be deployed in recording, reporting, analyzing and storing the relevant patient information. Therefore, when used properly, digital systems are error-free and will reduce all the errors in the data during reporting, analyzing or recording of patient data (Mamta, 2014). Additionally, the application of digital systems will end falsely collected data from diagnoses.
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In summary, informatics can reduce the risk of harmful treatment and prescription errors by improving communication, enabling patient information tracking and reducing the errors in recording, reporting or analyzing patient data.
References
Hussey, P. A., & Kennedy, M. A. (2015). Instantiating informatics in nursing practice for integrated patient centred holistic models of care: a discussion paper. Journal of Advanced Nursing , 72 (5), 1030–1041. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12927
Mamta, M. (2014). Nursing informatics: The future now. IOSR Journal of Nursing and Health Science , 3 (2), 51–53. https://doi.org/10.9790/1959-03245153
