The Role and Significance of Health Informatics in The Nursing Field are very essential to be known by workers in this wonderful profession
The significance of the nursing field keeps on growing, especially after the recent pandemic. Nowadays, more students are willing to pursue nursing as a full-time career.
They want to venture into this commendable field of the healthcare industry and provide better patient care to the masses.
Additionally, numerous changes and advancements have taken place in the global healthcare sector. One of the notable changes is the emergence of health informatics in nursing and general healthcare. Just like any other field, information technology has made its way and penetrated healthcare too. For healthcare workers, it is a remarkable change and helps in improving their technical skills and capabilities.
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Health Informatics in the Nursing Field
Another name for health informatics is health information systems, which is related to information technology.
It is an advanced field used in the healthcare sector to assemble and evaluate public health records and relevant data. Health informatics is rapidly growing as more healthcare organizations and facilities have started recognizing its importance.
They are rolling out training and development for healthcare workers to become well-versed in managing health informatics. With its help, workers now understand how to address different healthcare issues and manage them effectively.
For nurses, learning health informatics can be a great addition to their skillset, serving as a prospect for career advancement.
Let us talk about the role and significance of health informatics for nursing in detail.
Improved patient care
When more nurses have information technology within an arm’s reach, their performance improves with time. They get to learn about better and more effective ways and methods to manage patient care by leveraging technology.
Similarly, most healthcare degree programs have started offering courses on health informatics. It is indeed a tremendous opportunity for students to learn nursing and information technology side by side.
Take the terminal degree in nursing as a perfect example, which lets you polish your clinical and technical skills simultaneously. Moreover, it expands your knowledge about patient care with in-depth learning about practical concepts.
When nurses can quickly understand and analyze different medical records through health informatics, overall healthcare improves. Similarly, the various tech resources and tools available to nurses allow them to provide optimal care experiences to the patients.
Reduced medical malpractices
Besides providing optimal patient care, medical malpractices are an alarming concern of the healthcare sector. Nurses are responsible for preventing any medical errors from happening in the first place.
That’s because they are the frontline workers who frequently communicate with their patients. A single misdiagnosis or medical neglect can cost them their career and jeopardize the reputation of an organization.
However, nurses can eliminate this problem with the help of health informatics. For instance, an automated process to track medical records and identify sensitive information about different cases can prevent errors.
Also, health informatics can analyze various patient data and find any potential health risk/issue that may not be apparent to the naked eye. When nurses have accurate and readily available information about cases at hand, they can pay close attention to each case and make effective decisions.
In this way, the occurrence of medical malpractices reduces significantly, and patients remain safe at all times.
Better data analysis
The nursing profession is linked with improved data analysis and documentation of medical records. Nurses maintain direct contact with patients and are often the first to document the patient’s health issues. If they are unable to record and analyze information, the entire healthcare sector will suffer.
Since there is a lot of detailed and complex information to process manually, health informatics comes in super handy in maintaining medical records. This involvement of health informatics leaves a significant influence on the modern field of nursing.
With improved electronic documentation, nurses can focus on different pending tasks and provide better nursing care to their patients. Health informatics collect relevant data about changing patient needs and evaluate their health according to their history. Consequently, the patients get proper medical treatment without any delays.
Task management
When complex medical information gets automated, healthcare workers spend less time on a single task. Instead, they take over multiple functions at a time and become much more efficient. The same is true for nurses who can expertly tackle various emerging issues with the help of health informatics.
If they have doubts about a specific diagnosis and medical treatment, they consider the data provided by the health informatics. All of this helps in avoiding medical errors, and the costs of patient care reduce significantly.
Not just that, but the productivity levels of nurses improve after implementing health informatics. When this happens, nurses start performing better and prioritize work more alertly. Likewise, the implementation of health informatics reduces workload leading to fewer cases of burnout among nurses.
The Bottom Line
When you combine nursing with information technology, the results are revolutionary for the healthcare sector. The sooner everyone understands the changing role and significance of health informatics, the better.
Health informatics helps health organizations automate tasks, lessening workers’ burden. Similarly, it allows nurses to focus more on other crucial areas, such as providing optimal care.
By processing data and digging deeper into medical algorithms, health informatics can help in transforming the entire nursing field. Therefore, it is best to do some research and learn more about the importance of health informatics.
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Chibueze Uchegbu is a certified medical physiologist with a great passion for healthy living.