Impact of Nursing Informatics Essay Paper

Assignment: The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies

In the Discussion for this module, you considered the interaction of nurse informaticists with other specialists to ensure successful care. How is that success determined?

Patient outcomes and the fulfillment of care goals is one of the major ways that healthcare success is measured. Measuring patient outcomes results in the generation of data that can be used to improve results. Nursing informatics can have a significant part in this process and can help to improve outcomes by improving processes, identifying at-risk patients, and enhancing efficiency.

To Prepare:
•Review the concepts of technology application as presented in the Resources.
•Reflect on how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may help fortify nursing informatics as a specialty by leading to increased impact on patient outcomes or patient care efficiencies.

The Assignment: (4-5 pages)

In a 4- to 5-page project proposal written to the leadership of your healthcare organization, propose a nursing informatics project for your organization that you advocate to improve patient outcomes or patient-care efficiency. Your project proposal should include the following:
•Describe the project you propose.
•Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.
•Explain the patient outcome(s) or patient-care efficiencies this project is aimed at improving and explain how this improvement would occur. Be specific and provide examples.
•Identify the technologies required to implement this project and explain why.
•Identify the project team (by roles) and explain how you would incorporate the nurse informaticists in the project team.

Impact of Nursing Informatics

Pressure ulcers (PU) refers to injuries to the skin and underlying tissue that patients with physical mobility problems develop after their skin is exposed to prolonged pressure. They typically develop around body areas to include the tailbone, hips, ankles and heels. PU can develop over days or even hours. Impact of Nursing Informatics Essay Paper  The main nursing concern for PUC is that although treatment is available to help the PU, some of them do not heal completely and could easily reoccur. As a health concern, PU affects millions of adult patients with a 65% increase in incidence every decade. In addition, it increases the total number of hospitalizations by 11%. Besides that, PU is costly with medical charges increasing by as much as $37,000. Other than the mentioned concerns, PU has a high post-operative respiratory failure rate and failure to rescue rate. Given the nursing shortage, increasingly fragmented care and aging population, it becomes clear that incidences of PU are most likely to continue increasing. PU occurrence has been a present nursing concern for as long as the profession has existed. In fact, Florence Nightingale once commented that nursing failures, and not the patient’s disease, result in PU. The implication is that PU is associated with non-existent or poor quality nursing care. Based on this awareness, it is not hard to accept that nurses play a major role in the prevention of PU occurrence (Shippee-Rice, Fetzer & Long, 2012). The present paper summarizes a proposed nursing informatics project that will seek to leverage nursing data (particularly PU incidence, prevalence, risk assessment, grading and prevention data) as elements of PU to support the delivery of patient care.

Describe the project you propose.

PU is a major health care problem that is prevalent and common. It is a concern because it can be prevented through appropriate nursing interventions. However, there is no accurate portrait of PU this making difficult for the facility to direct nursing interventions towards areas that would effectively reduce PU incidence. Nurses at the facility routinely collect and record a large volume of data on PU. Yet, the data has not been leveraged to inform nursing practice. The proposed project intends to conduct an analysis of this data with a focus on identifying the magnitude of PU incidences and the effects of the different nursing interventions. This will help with ensuring that the collected nursing data is leveraged to improve practice and outcomes. To be more precise, the proposed project seeks to make sense of the available nursing data and present it in a format that facilitates decision-making with regards to the nursing procedures and policies that work best in preventing PU occurrence (Shippee-Rice, Fetzer & Long, 2012).

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Literature review reveals that there are many nursing interventions that can be applied to prevent PU incidences. However, each intervention has different costs and outcomes. Besides that, nursing care delivery is faced with the urgent reality that resources are limited and whatever is available must be efficiently used for the best outcomes. The facility already understands that PU is a concern and has implemented evidence-based nursing prevention measures. Still, these measures are best on what is considered best industry practice and review of current literature. The result is a generalized approach that may not work best for the facility. The proposed project intends to recommend solutions that are personalized for the facility that analyzing the nursing data collected for the facility and optimizing it for the best outcomes. Towards this end, the project will correlate nursing care with PU occurrence and develop a risk model that links specific nursing actions to changes in incidence rate for PU. The correlation matrix will be developed into a predictive model that will, with a high degree of accuracy, determine the specific nursing interventions that each patient requires to minimize the risk of PU occurrence (Elliot, Aitken & Chaboyer, 2012). As a result, the propose project will present empirical evidence that determines how nursing resources and interventions can be optimally deployed as preventive measures to counter the threat posed by PU.

Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.

The proposed project will impact seven groups of stakeholder. The first group is nurses. The project has an impact on them by determining how their deployment should be optimized to counter PU as a threat. This is likely to change their current work structures by presenting new procedures, protocols and policies, such as a need for more frequent rounds, changes in what is recorded, and communication with patients. Also, nurses are likely to be required to acquire new knowledge that is specific to PU prevention such as how to identify signs of eminent PU and what to do in such cases. The second group is other medical personnel. In addition to nurses, other medical personnel would be required to help with preventing PU. This will entails changing some of their protocols and procedures so that they include measures specifically targeted at PU prevention and management. The third group is the facility’s management. The facility is concerned with care outcomes because this has implications for business outcomes. Favorable care outcomes improve the facility’s public image so that more patients use the facility thereby increasing its income. Besides that, changing in nursing protocols and procedures could have staffing interventions, causing the facility to modify its budget. Also, the medical personnel could require in-house training on PU prevention and control, and it is the facility’s management that would invest on the personnel training. The project results have implications for the management and investment decisions made by the facility (Huber, 2014).

The fourth group is the patients, particularly older adult inpatients who are at high risk of developing PU. The project results are intended to improve PU prevention and management measures. This is likely to result in reduced PU incidences among the patients, a favorable outcome since they are interested in getting better fast and spending less on care. Incidences of PU causes them to spend more time receiving care and spend more money on care, an outcome that they would consider very unfavorable. As such, their interest is in their nursing care quality improving so that the measures effectively minimize PU incidences. The fifth group is regulatory agencies that are concerned with monitoring the quality of care delivered in medical facilities and ensuring that preventable incidences do not occur. PU is a preventable incidence and these agencies are concerned with minimizing their occurrence as a quality management measure. The results of the study can help inform their recommendations for PU prevention and management policies to be applied by other facilities. Also, they are likely to reference the project’s results when recommending that PU prevention policies be adopted in standard nursing care practices. The sixth group is nursing care and infection prevention researchers. The project results would act as a source of information that helps them to explore epidemiological data and its implications. It would help these researchers to correlate the different nursing care approaches with PU care outcomes. The project results are also useful for informing future research through critiquing the project protocols and addressing their shortcomings in subsequent research. The seventh group is special interest groups who represent the other stakeholders and engage in advocacy activities. These special interest groups would be interested in the research implications for their members. Patient groups would be interested in ensuring that practices to minimize PU incidence are applied while health care personnel groups would be interested in ensuring that health care approaches are optimized without disadvantaging their members (Huber, 2014).

Explain the patient outcome(s) or patient-care efficiencies this project is aimed at improving and explain how this improvement would occur.

The project is focused on optimizing nursing interventions to minimize PU occurrence and improve management. This has implications for patient outcomes through reducing PU incidences so that patients do not stay in the facility for longer. The shorter stays reduce opportunities for patients to develop other hospital acquired infections. Also, it reduces the cost of care as having PU would require them to spend more on care. In addition, the project has implications for patient-care efficiencies through directing nursing care interventions. The project results will tell nurses what to do to achieve specific outcomes. Such predictive models help in reducing the time spend in discussions so that nurses spend their time more efficiently in doing what is necessary and leaving out the unnecessary. Like other health care resources, nurses are a limited resources and directing them to where they are needed most ensures that all efforts are directed at achieving the most benefits (Shippee-Rice, Fetzer & Long, 2012).

Identify the technologies required to implement this project and explain why.

The project will make use of two technologies. Firstly, it will make use of the facility’s electronic health records (EHR) system. The data acquired from accessing the system will populate the PU variables of interest to the study. The EHR system acts as the central database for all nursing notes and data on PU in the facility. This information will act as the raw data that will be analyzed by the project to determine trends and models that predict how changes in every nursing action will affect PU incidence. The second technology is a computer with an installed data analysis software capable of analyzing large data and presenting the required data correlations, trends and models (Garcia-Dia, 2019).

Identify the project team (by roles) and explain how you would incorporate the nurse informaticist in the project team.

The project team will be made up of four members. The first member is the project manager. This individual is concerned with developing the project details that include objectives and scope, and identifying what data is necessary and how the data will be analyzed to present results. The second individual is the facility representative. This individual will act as the communication link between the facility and the project team. In addition, this individual will provide access to the EHR system, which is typically protected. The third member is a nurse informaticist who will develop protocols for using the protected data acquired from the EHR system and ensuring that privacy expectations are not violated. The final member is the project champion. This is a member of the nursing staff who has the capacity to convince other medical personnel to support the project. This individual will act as a liaison between the project and other medical personnel, and present their concerns for action (Garcia-Dia, 2019).

References

Elliot, D., Aitken, L. & Chaboyer, W. (2012). ACCCN’s Critical Care Nursing (2^nd ed.). Elsevier Australia.

Garcia-Dia, M. (2019). Project Management in Nursing Informatics. Springer Publishing Company.

Huber, D. (2014). Leadership and Nursing Care Management (5^th ed.). Elsevier/Saunders.

Shippee-Rice, R., Fetzer, S. & Long, J. (2012). Gerioperative Nursing Care: Principles and Practices of Surgical Care for the Older Adult. Springer Publishing Company.  Impact of Nursing Informatics Essay Paper