1
I am currently a BSN student at St. John’s College of Nursing. I am taking a class called Health Care Informatics in which I am learning different modes of technological communication as well as how technology is used in the medical field to share information. I felt some trepidation while beginning this course, as I still do. I am not very technologically savvy and have never blogged or Tweeted as a means of communication. But I am trying to throw myself into this course and the technology used with it in order to get all I can out of the content. Hopefully by the end of the course I will be comfortable with these modes of communication or at least understand the various things that can be accomplished by using them. Here’s to getting my words out there!
What exactly is health care informatics? Our text, Nursing Informatics and the Foundation of Knowledge, states that nursing informatics is “…a combination of nursing science, information science, and computer science.” We use technology in healthcare every day. When we have a patient, we take their vital signs using equipment and perform an assessment. We then put these facts into the computer system as data. When we see all the data together, we can use the information formed by it to treat the patient correctly. With the use of an electronic health record, (EHR) many people can access the exact same data from almost anywhere.
Why is health care informatics important? We as healthcare providers use informatics every day. We use the data provided by the patient and use it to figure out how to care for them. Every person involved in a patient’s care inputs data into an interface that allows for a picture to be painted. What is going on with this patient? Are they getting better or worse in terms of their disease process? Radiology, physicians, nurses, laboratory, respiratory therapy, speech therapy, pastoral care…every person who has access to the patient’s chart can put in information that paints the picture. I will use my experience to give an example. Before St. John’s was using an EHR, there was the chart. The physicians would come to the nurse’s station and say, “Where is that patient’s chart?” It was a physical object that only one person could be in possession of at a time. Every person that needed to access it could not at times, because another person had it. So sometimes, things went undocumented and other care givers were left wondering, “Has the doctor been by today?” “Has PT been by to work with them today?” It was not a reliable tool. The system we have now, EPIC, is not a single user interface as the physical chart was, so to speak. Multiple users can access the patient information at one time, and care gets delivered faster. Our text says that, “Information technology per se is not the focus; it is the information it conveys that is central.” I think this quote says it all. Who cares what we use to store patient information? It doesn’t matter, as long as the patient is getting the most reliable and thorough care possible.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2009). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (pp. 5-95). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers
Michelle,
Very thorough assessment of the information system. I agree with the old charting system and how antiquated is seemed. I remeber when I first started in the medical field and the physicians were writing hand scripts and I couldn’t believe that was in practice due to the fact that they were rarely legible to me.
Christina Jarvis