Five Ways Healthcare Informatics Help Nurses

Let’s face it. Healthcare informatics and technology are here and they’re here to stay. Email fatigue is real, new electronic health record systems can be tough to master, and who can remember all their passwords. However, despite these pitfalls, technology doesn’t have to be the enemy. When it comes to healthcare, Informatics and technology can save lives, shorten wait times, and increase patient safety and satisfaction.

Healthcare informatics and technology can help nurses….

1. Further Education: Informatics allows for resources like Nursing Reference Center™ Plus to provide nurses with quick and easy access to trusted evidence-based information and education tools. Additionally, platforms like social media expose nurses to a vast array of health information and open the door for collaboration with other care providers.
2. Increase Communication: Informatics simplify communication. New healthcare technology enables clinicians to text, email and instant message.  Gone are the days of paging and calling. Clinician-to-clinician communication is now faster and easier than ever before, helping nurses and other clinicians spend more time with patients and less time having to track each other down to communicate about patients.
3. Save Lives: Everything from telemetry to automated blood pressure cuffs are considered informatics tools and help keep patients safe. As a nurse, you have so much to track and monitor. Being able to rely on equipment and healthcare technology like telemetry monitors helps reduce errors and makes it possible for you to be present and engaged with your patients.
4. Protect Themselves: Charting via an electronic health record (EHR) helps protect nurses if patient care activities are ever called into question later. All those hard stops in an EHR can feel frustrating, but they are actually there to remind nurses of essential charting pieces, keeping record that the right patient care has been delivered.
5. Increase Efficiency: A well-designed system or electronic health record can help nurses answer questions quickly, chart comprehensively and look up patient information effortlessly. All of this frees up time for the busy clinician that could be better spent with patients.  

By embracing healthcare informatics and technology, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and using them to help clinical decision making, healthcare providers can stay ahead of the curve and help advance their practice and patient safety.