Discussion: Interaction Between Nurse Informaticists and Other Specialists

Nature offers many examples of specialization and collaboration. Ant colonies and bee hives are but two examples of nature’s sophisticated organizations. Each thrives because their members specialize by tasks, divide labor, and collaborate to ensure food, safety, and general well-being of the colony or hive.

Of course, humans don’t fare too badly in this regard either. And healthcare is a great example. As specialists in the collection, access, and application of data, nurse informaticists collaborate with specialists on a regular basis to ensure that appropriate data is available to make decisions and take actions to ensure the general well-being of patients.

In this Discussion, you will reflect on your own observations of and/or experiences with informaticist collaboration. You will also propose strategies for how these collaborative experiences might be improved.

To Prepare:

Review the Resources and reflect on the evolution of nursing informatics from a science to a nursing specialty.
Consider your experiences with nurse Informaticists or technology specialists within your healthcare organization.

By Day 3 of Week 3

Post a description of experiences or observations about how nurse informaticists and/or data or technology specialists interact with other professionals within your healthcare organization. Suggest at least one strategy on how these interactions might be improved. Be specific and provide examples. Then, explain the impact you believe the continued evolution of nursing informatics as a specialty and/or the continued emergence of new technologies might have on professional interactions.

The facility I am employed at does not seem to be thriving financially as opposed to other hospitals I have worked at. Our resources are thin. For example, my inpatient psychiatric unit does not have a Pyxis, a machine that holds all the used medications. We use very old medication carts, which do not lock, which is probably violating code. This is a good example of how my facility is generally behind the times. Our electronic health record is a poor system as well. We use Meditech. It is generally an easy software to navigate, but there are some flaws. One huge flaw is that once a RN acknowledges an order, it is not easy to find that order after it has been acknowledged. For example, if the doctor has ordered vital signs to be done every 4 hours for a patient, it is easy to see that that order was entered, and then we acknowledge that order. After that, you cannot find that order to fulfill doing the vitals every 4 hours. Then the doctor will ask you why you did not assess the vitals “q4”, and you as the RN had no idea that they were on q4 vitals because the RN on previous shift acknowledged the order and did not report it to you. Little things like this are good examples of how poor our facility is with technology.

I have worked night shift for as long as I have been in my facility and we have an IT number to call 24/7 whenever having issues with hardware/software. The issue is that if the IT specialist cannot help fix the issue over the phone, then the issue must wait until a weekday during business hours for an IT specialist to arrive. This is not a problem if it is a minor issue that can wait, but sometimes it is not minor, maybe the printer is down or maybe something that needs to be fixed right away in order for the unit to function. I believe this can easily be improved if the facility made sure to have IT specialists on premises more hours. It may not need to be 24 hours per day 7 days per week, but more than 9 to 5 Monday through Friday would be important to ensure that your facility is operating ideally. With the ever-more reliance on electronic health records, technology and informatics are becoming vital to the healthcare field. Think about how far healthcare and hospitals have come since paper charting. Nurses of older generation who had no computer skills were thrust into the EHR world and forced to adjust. That is not an easy task for a nurse who have been doing things a certain way their entire career. Nurses no matter what their history, must have competencies in informatics (Murphy, et al., 2018).

Murphy, J., Honey, M., Newbold, S., Weber, P., & Wu, Y. H. (2018). Forecasting Informatics

Competencies for Nurses in the Future of Connected Health. Studies in Health Technology and

Informatics.

By Day 6 of Week 3

Respond to at least two of your colleagues* on two different days, offering one or more additional interaction strategies in support of the examples/observations shared or by offering further insight to the thoughts shared about the future of these interactions.

Welcome to health care, where communication is always lacking. There is not enough follow-through, and information gets lost from shift-to-shift reports. A lot is going on in those eight, ten, twelve, or sixteen hours. I work two jobs, and one of them is part-time in a nursing home. I had found that somebody did not complete a resident medication change when I finished my shift until the next time I worked.

Mandated reporting accomplishes nothing as I have done this in the past, requesting notification of the results. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, most are unsubstantiated, making reporting useless if nothing gets done. “Communication errors in the health care setting are one of the major contributors to adverse events, causing significant costs to health care organizations and potential harm to patients every year” Aronson et al. (2021).

Researchers found that several necessities are required for successful communication handoff using electronic health records (EHR) in a systemic review. The healthcare workers that will use the EHR need to be involved in the implementation of the design. The information relayed to users must be relevant to patient care, easily accessible, and standardized so all users can understand communication. The EHR must be customizable to hand off critical pieces of patient info. Some nurses preferred the ability to use a stylus for better customization. The report concluded that “by involving end-users in the creation of e-handoff tools and ensuring that they provide a comprehensive, standardized, aesthetic and mobile report with enough flexibility for some end-user customization, the tools can be more widely adopted and used” Aronson et al. (2021).

Hawaii Pacific Health cut unnecessary EHR documentation to slash employee burnout. Less tedious documentation allows caregivers to spend more time with the patient. The facility updates and finds ways to document how to suit the patient and employees better. The stupid stuff program, as they call it, alleviates unnecessary documentation (Monica, 2018).

When a facility recruits an EHR, it should keep in mind technical support and accessibility. Using tech support within the United States alleviates language barriers. Most companies outsource their technical support overseas, making it difficult to reach them when needed. Rossow (2019) reports that “people overseas were willing to work for a lower rate. Tech support out of the country caused many problems down the line for customers. Between language barriers, hours of operations, understanding of the industry, and solutions to their questions, U.S customers prefer U.S.-based customer support.”

References

Aronson, T. M., Oertle, S. E., & Piscotty Jr., R. J. (2021, April 20). Key Characteristics of a Successful EHR-Supported e-Handoff Tool: A Systematic Review. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 25(1). Retrieved 2021, from The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Inc. (HIMSS): https://www.himss.org/resources/online-journal-nursing-informatics.

Monica, K. (2018). Simplifying Clinical Documentation to Cut Administrative Burden A program at Hawaii Pacific Health designed to simplify EHR clinical documentation is tackling provider burnout at the root. . EHR Intelligence. xtelligent healthcare media. Retrieved from https://ehrintelligence.com/news/simplifying-clinical-documentation-to-cut-administrative-burden

Rossow, R. (2019, August 27). EHR Customer Support: Why U.S. Based Makes a Difference. Retrieved 2021, from iSalus: https://isalushealthcare.com/blog/ehr-customer-support-why-u-s-based-makes-a-difference/