Understanding Nursing Informatics: Overview and FAQ

Research shows that healthcare creates a staggering 30% of the world’s total digital data volume. These huge amounts of data become unmanageable for many facilities. Valuable information is easily lost and wasted instead of being used to drive patient outcomes and support evidence-based care practices.

Nursing informatics (NI) is a powerful tool for solving this problem. When technology is used effectively in clinical settings, organizations can reshape big data into actionable information that improves patient care. By engaging nurses in all stages of information technology development — from design to implementation and optimization — your facility can harness nursing data and knowledge to drive patient outcomes.

We’ll discuss what nurse informatics is and answer your most frequently asked questions. From an organizational perspective, we’ll look at how healthcare systems use NI, its importance to facilities, commonly faced challenges, and the exciting future it holds for the nursing profession.

What Is Nursing Informatics?

Professionals at the American Nurses Association (ANA) define nursing informatics as “the specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice.” In other words, the field of NI fuses technology with nursing practice. NI specialists are the bridge between the worlds of clinical nursing practice and information technology (IT) and are experts in understanding the needs and capabilities of both.

Information technology is a valuable resource for healthcare organizations and when used effectively, it positively impacts all aspects of nursing, including clinical nursing, management, research, and education. At its core, the goal of NI is to improve patient care and outcomes through data and technology.

The ANA recognizes NI as a distinct discipline of nursing with its own scope and standards of practice. These registered nurses, sometimes called “nursing informatics specialists,” are specially trained, and many hold an American Nursing Credentialing Center (ANCC) Informatics Nursing Certification.

How Do Facilities Use Nursing Informatics? Examples

NI is needed to collect, organize, and present information in usable ways. To do this, technology must be tailored to your nurses’ workflows and processes. At the same time, your team must adopt and embrace the changes in practice that technology brings. Here are a few examples of nursing informatics and how facilities use it to optimize technology.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems

EHRs are the backbone of NI that allow staff to access and document patient information in real time. Not only do they facilitate patient care, but they also help with the tracking and monitoring of information that must be reported to federal health agencies.

Example: A manager pulls data directly from the EHR to formulate and send a report to national registries and databases.

Data Analytics

Facilities also use big data and reporting to identify trends and patterns in patient care. The electronic documentation and transfer of information allows this data to be more easily accessed and analyzed.

Example: A facility administrator tracks patient movement and transfer times within the facility by monitoring data in the EHR.

Research

Advances in precision medicine, pharmaceuticals, genomics, and medical research initiatives make this area more important than ever. Research requires large amounts of patient information and informatics provides access to real-time data sets.

Example: A nurse researcher conducts a study to assess the effects of a new therapy for epilepsy by pulling patient data directly from the EHR.

Patient Safety and Quality

Many hospital departments use data to monitor quality indicators and metrics. Improvement initiatives are based on data and track changes over time.

Example: A facility implements barcode medication scanning to monitor and improve safe administration practices.

Telehealth and Telenursing

Technology enables virtual assessments and remote patient monitoring. This area has seen tremendous growth in recent years.

Example: A facility offers Zoom consultations to patients to prevent crowding at the facility and increase patient access to care.

Clinical Decision Support

Clinical decision support systems help nurses make evidence-based decisions while working with patients. These systems can be integrated into EHRs or used separately within a hospital’s computer systems.

Example: Clinical decision support alerts a nurse to dangerous trends in vital signs and possible drug interactions.

Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Technology facilitates the exchange of health information, allowing the sharing of patient data between different healthcare organizations. This improves care coordination but can also raise privacy and security concerns.

Example: A patient transfers from a hospital to a separate hospice facility. HIE gives the patient’s staff easy access to their health information.

What Is the Importance of Informatics in Nursing?

The adoption of nursing informatics programs can benefit your organization by impacting patient care and managerial operations. Data collected in your facility can be used to promote the productivity, efficiency, performance, effectiveness, cost, and value of nursing care. Most importantly, patient outcomes benefit when technologies support nurses in delivering evidence-based care.

Quality improvement programs and compliance with regulatory requirements are often based on nursing documentation. For example, data identifying hospital-acquired pressure injuries is easily pulled from the EHR. The financial value of these outcome measures will only increase as the shift continues from fee-for-service toward value-based payment models.

What Are Common Challenges in Informatics?

Adopting new technologies isn’t easy. It can be a struggle for many facilities, whether you’re using a new EHR or optimizing an existing one. Solutions are often complex and require input from interdisciplinary teams, including nursing informatics. Improving your procedures is an iterative process that will require time, testing, and patience from staff. Your NI team must consist of skilled problem-solvers who look for solutions instead of barriers.

Some common areas of difficulty include:

• Over-burdened workload
• Poor system usability
• Safety concerns
• Privacy and data security
• Staff training
• Resistance to change
• Time limitations
• Computer literacy deficits
• Change fatigue

Documenting in the EHR takes up a significant portion of work time for healthcare workers. Using NI to streamline staff’s interactions with technology gives nurses more time to spend with their patients instead of documenting. Poorly designed systems can cause safety problems and lead to widespread nurse dissatisfaction and burnout. Technology must help their work, not make it more difficult.

What Is the Role of Nursing Leadership in Informatics?

As a group, nurses generate the most data in the EHR because of their close contact with patients. It’s crucial that nursing leadership is involved in decision-making about how technology is used in the clinical setting. Your nurse leaders must have a solid understanding of technology and how nurse data supports patient outcomes and determines value-based care measures.

If leaders don’t appreciate, value, or embrace the use of technologies, NI efforts are doomed to fail. Beyond patient care, technology systems also impact your leaders through human resources, finance, scheduling, and productivity management. Studies show that when leaders maximize technologies, using them to carefully plan shifts and manage their team, the quality of care improves.

What Is the Outlook for Nursing Informatics?

The future of NI is booming. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are bringing tremendous growth and change to healthcare delivery. Informatics will be essential for adapting these technologies to clinical applications.

With telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and virtual nursing exploding in use, it’s more important than ever that these diverse systems communicate with each other in ways that protect patient health information. NI specialists are the champions who help your team harness the power of these advances and customize technology systems to meet your organization’s needs.

Looking for More Ways to Leverage Technology?

We’ve discussed what nursing informatics is and why it’s important to your facility. If you’re looking for more ways to promote the adoption of technology in your team, IntelyCare can help. Don’t miss out on our free nursing management insights that support healthcare managers.