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

The competencies and skills of nursing informatics indicate that it is an important field. Concerned with integrating information technology into all aspects of nursing such as education, research, management and clinical nursing, informatics enables nurses to improve patient outcomes and patient care efficiencies. This is important for nurses who are increasingly become ‘high tech’ as they have more technology at their disposal than the nurses before them. In the present world where the potential for applying information and communication technologies is increasing to enhance the quality of nursing domains outcomes, it becomes clear that nursing informatics has much value (Darvish et al., 2014). The present paper offers the details of a proposed project to leverage nursing informatics to achieve improved patient outcomes and patient care efficiencies.

Describe the project you propose.

The proposed project intends to conduct a data research to identify the factors that influence the occurrence, incidences and severity of hospital acquired infection (HAI). The focus is on identifying the specific hospital departments that report the highest incidences of HAI and make statistical correlations as to what factors are different in these departments thus causing them to report higher incidences of HAI. The project will apply a secondary research approach that will involve evaluating medical records and notes. The emphasis of the project will be on applying nursing informatics competencies to re-analyze, interpret and review past medical records (Lautenbach et al., 2018).

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The choice of a secondary research approach has been made for four reasons. Firstly, it saves time as it only involves selecting, preparing and analyzing existing data sets without having to collect new data. Secondly, the data is easily accessible and is organized in a format that informs on the trends of interest. The data is already organized for hospital departments, patient procedures, and nursing approaches. Thirdly, it allows the project to be based on a large scope of data. It offers an opportunity to work with an immensely large data set that had already been collected. Finally, the data was professionally collected. Impact of Nursing Informatics Essay Paper  Medically records are professionally collected with a focus on accuracy thus reducing the possibility of data flaws (Wickramasighe, Troshani & Tan, 2016).

Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.

The project is an infection control measure. Six groups of stakeholders are impacted by the project. The first group is primary care providers who include nurses, pharmacists and general practitioners. The results of the project are likely to affect how they provide care and their procedures. The second group is the hospital facility administration. The results of the project are likely to reduce HAI incidences thus improving its reputation. The third group is patients. The results of the project will present strategies for reducing HAI thereby improving their health and reducing care costs. The fourth group is regulatory organizations such as government agencies. The results of the project will help inform infection control policies that they advocate for and implement. If the project identifies specific factors as being responsible for high incidences of HAI, then regulatory organizations are likely to reference the project while making policy recommendations. The fifth group are infection control researchers who are interested in identifying factors influencing HAI occurrence in hospitals. The final group are special interest groups such as professional organizations and patient organizations. The project results will act as a reference when engaging in advocacy (Lautenbach et al., 2018).

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 targeted at identifying the factors that influence HAI occurrence. It acknowledges that many processes and procedures occur within the hospital environment and it is difficult to identify to correlate these processes and procedures to HAI incidences. Data analysis facilitates these efforts by correlating specific processes and procedures to HAI incidences. This is an important step in HAI control as resources are limited and it is unrealistic to arbitrarily target processes and procedures. The specific factors identified by HAI will be targeted by the available limited resources to reduce HAI incidences so that both patient outcomes and patent care efficiencies are improved (Lau et al., 2017). To be more precise this is a quality of care initiative that perceives HAI are a preventable issue and therefore its occurrence is unacceptable. The project results will help in avoiding HAI occurrence through offering evidence on best practices. It will specifically target the shortcomings of human factors and the design of health care systems for improved performance (Lau et al., 2017).

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

The project will require access to the hospital’s electronic health records (EHR) system. The EHR system contains the medical records that will be analyzed to identify the factors influencing HAI occurrence. As the main database that contains all medical related data in the hospital, access to the EHR system implies having access to all the medical related data in the facility. This is information that cannot be collected through any other means except through accessing the EHR system. The project will specifically use de-identified data, which does not contain any information that can identify the specific patients. In addition, the project will require a computer with a data analysis software. The software will be useful in conducting statistical analysis of the large data acquired from the EHR system and identifying data trends that would then determine which factors correlate with and predict HAI incidences (Wickramasighe, Troshani & Tan, 2016).

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

The project team will have four members. The first member is the facility representative who will provide access to the EHR system, ensuring that the project has the facility’s support. The second member is the project implementer who is the main point person and responsible for the project’s success. This member is accountable to the facility and other team members. In addition, this member corrals the other team members and defines the steps taken to achieve the project objectives. Besides that, this member keeps the project on budget, on time and within the scope. The third member project champion who will act as a liaison between the project and other stakeholders in the facility to help resolve issues throughout the project. The fourth member is a nursing informaticist who represents EHR system users at the facility and is responsible for defining policy and monitoring compliance (Lautenbach et al., 2018).

References

Darvish, A. Bahramnezhad, F., Keyhanian, S. & Navidhamidi, M. (2014). The Role of Nursing Informatics on Promoting Quality of Health Care and the Need for Appropriate Education. Global Journal of Health Science, 6(6), 11-18. https://doi.org/10.5539/gjhs.v6n6p11

Lau, F., Bartle-Clar, J., Bliss, G., Borycki, E., Courtney, K. & Kuo, A. (Eds) (2017). Building Capacity for Health Informatics in the Future. IOS Press.

Lautenbach, E., Malani, P., Woeltje, K., Han, J., Shuman, E. & Marschall, J. (Eds) (2018). Practical Health Epidemiology (4^th ed.). Cmabridge University Press.

Wickramasinghe, N., Troshani, I. & Tan, J. (Eds). (2016). Contemporary Consumer Health Informatics. Springer.  Impact of Nursing Informatics Essay Paper