Nursing informatics enables health care organizations to transform data into information that helps health care practitioners, such as nurses and physicians, to deliver the best possible outcomes for patients. It combines nursing science, systems-driven analytics, and information science to identify, capture, manage, and share health care data. A key aim of nursing informatics is providing clinicians responsible for health care decisions with timely, accurate patient health data to deliver patient-centered care and improve outcomes.
Nursing informatics helps improve vital nursing processes like documentation, which is an important aspect of the profession and essential for effective patient care. Before electronic health records (EHRs), nurses recorded patient information on charts. Today, nursing informatics simplifies documentation and automates the transmission of patient data via connected devices to provide access by nurses, physicians, and patients.
Understanding the role of nursing informatics in nursing practice is critical for individuals to advance their health care careers. The benefits of nursing informatics include a reduction in medical errors, lower costs, improved nurse productivity, and better care coordination among nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and others throughout various care stages.
Advancements in the future of nursing informatics will center on automated patient and clinical data records, improved operations at health care facilities, simplified data collection, tracking, and analysis, and real-time access to patient information anytime, anywhere.
The success of nursing informatics supports a promising future in its application to nursing practice. In case study after case study, evidence demonstrates that nursing informatics positively impacts the quality of care. The results of one study show that nursing information systems improved quality through better nursing documentation processes, enhanced patient care planning, and optimized workflows. Another case study shows the correlation between the technology used to administer medications and reductions in medication errors, which, in addition to improving patient safety, reduced anxiety in nurses and increased job satisfaction.
Which nursing informatics future trends are on the horizon? Increased connectivity will improve knowledge sharing and collaboration between hospitals, doctors, and patients on a global scale. It will benefit the advancement of medical research and help in diagnosing, treating, preventing, and curing diseases and global epidemics. Faster systems that interact efficiently with each other are needed to support this future vision. But, with increased access comes security concerns, which make data security a top priority in the future of nursing informatics. Today’s data breaches highlight the importance of cybersecurity in nursing. In a recent example, a hospital in Kansas paid a ransom to hackers who broke into its network infrastructure and locked access to data. Even after paying the ransom, the hospital gained limited access to the data, as the hackers tried to extort another ransom payment. Thankfully, patient treatments weren’t affected.
Nursing informatics future trends also will support patient data analysis. For example, big data science is a key area of interest, according to a paper presented at the 13th International Conference in Nursing Informatics in 2016. Big data in nursing informatics is a concept that refers to the use of computational techniques to analyze large data sets to reveal patterns and trends that promote patient health and enhance the quality of care. The application of big data science in nursing informatics includes the use of advanced analytics, such as natural language processing, data mining methods, and data harmonization. These techniques enable the capture of unstructured data, identification of patterns, and integration of the data to provide insights that can be acted upon. Better decision-making can lead to improved personalized medicine and health care delivery.