Being in the nursing field gives you a platform to help patients, but if you’re interested in extending your care to a whole facility, you might consider a career in nursing informatics. As a nursing informatics specialist, you’ll be able to assist with health information data and technology to increase nurses’ quality of care. Keep reading to find out more about this impactful career.
What Is Nursing Informatics?
Nursing informatics is an intersection between patient care and patient health information. As a nurse informaticist, you’ll be responsible for many of the tools and processes nurses use daily. Job duties include:
- Designing, creating, testing, and putting into place new or modified information solutions, like electronic health records and communications tools
- Consulting with nurses on how to set up healthcare software and hardware, such as monitoring devices
- Analyzing information systems data to improve nursing services and reduce errors
- Acting as a translator between nurses, system engineers, analysts, or designers
- Creating strategies and policies to introduce, evaluate, or modify healthcare technology
- Developing ways to better ensure patient data security and confidentiality
- While more technical than other nursing careers, the main goal of nursing informatics is enhancing patient care. Better information systems and data mean fewer medical errors and better handling of patient data.
How Nursing Informatics Differs from Traditional Nursing
While nursing informatics and traditional nursing have the same roots, they differ in how they touch patients’ lives.
Traditional nurses find themselves face-to-face with patients, using software and hardware devices to keep track of health status. Nursing informatics specialists work towards these same patient outcomes by integrating nursing practices with information and communication technologies to create safe and effective standards of care.
Think of it as the behind-the-scenes work that allows nurses to do their tasks with as much advanced technology as possible, such as interprofessional workflows and communication systems, or detailed electronic medical record (EMR) management.
Nursing Informatics vs. Health Informatics
Another important distinction to make is between nursing informatics and health informatics. Nursing informatics is focused on patient care, specifically by optimizing the technology used by nurses. Health informatics is focused on the administration concerns, such as those surrounding data security and technology compliance standards.
Nurse Informaticist Job Description
So, what exactly does a nurse informaticist do? Overall, you’ll get a good balance between independent work and user-facing support.
A high-level task for those on the job involves evaluating and supporting healthcare technology, whether software or hardware. This means you’ll need to educate, train, and support the nurses who use it on an ongoing basis. It’s also common to project manage those who are also working with you to streamline patient care services, since you’ll have both the clinical and technical experience needed to determine the criteria for success.
What other careers can I pursue in nurse informatics?
A variety of medical settings, from hospitals to health care vendors, need nurse informatics specialists. Nurse vendor representatives, nurse programmers, nurse managers, and nurse communicators are examples of popular informatics careers.
Why It’s Important
Technology is an integral part of any healthcare organization. To stay on the cutting edge, more facilities are recognizing the importance of having a healthcare information technology (IT) professional on staff.
In their 2016 Leadership Survey, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) examined the latest trends in healthcare IT. According to their findings, 95% of respondents “view health IT as a strategically critical tool to help healthcare organizations be successful.”
This is good news if you’re interested in pursuing a career in a critically vital field. The majority of respondents to the survey said this type of role can help with efforts focused on patient care. This includes clinical integration, primary care provider efficiency, mandated quality metrics improvement, and care coordination.
As a nurse informatics specialist, you can help deliver better results by performing tasks such as:
- Policy writing
- Training and supporting system users
- Designing systems
- Quality control
- Project management
- Choosing and implementing systems
- Being able to communicate information and understand data can also help improve a healthcare organization’s patient outcomes and allow them to make better decisions.
To learn more please visit World Nursing Congress 2020
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