The worlds of health care, communication, and information technologies
are ever evolving, separately and together. As nurses in the the community
expand thier practice definition to embrace new information technologies,
opportunities for improved health care to populations seem endless. This
evolution is seen as a merger of health care technology with information and
communications technology, fostering the design and implementation of health
care management information systems in a variety of clinical practice
settings.the clinical practice settings involved in this new technology include
both the acute care and community-based practice environments. Organizations
such as hospitals and community-based agencies such as public health
departements and home agencies use information and communications
technologies to collect, restore, retrieve, analyze, and present client care data in
the care delivery settings. Health care continues to be a human endeavor that is
necessarily complex in nature. Decisions related to client care continue to
increase in complexity, with the need for rapid, accurate information for clinical
decisions making as a priority for effective care.
Nursing Informatics uses nursing science, computer and communications
technologies to produce effective and efficient client outcomes for individuals
and communities.
Informatics generally can be defined as the art and science of turning data
into information. The more recently informatics defined as the study of the
application of computer tcchnology and ststistical techniques to the
management of information.
The nurse can use the information technology to manag and process the
information with the assistence of the computer. Informatics provides tools to
help to process, store, retrive and analyze data and information to improve
patient care. The nurse should search for more and new knowledge from
different source and maintaing continuing education. Informatics can help her in
this role and can provide computerized assessment and documentation forms
that facilitat data collection and maintain right information at right time. This
saves her time and effort. The goal is to ensure that data collected and housed
within automated record system to be available as information for health care
professional, administrative and research personnel.
1- The Beginning Nurse \u2192 have a fundamental information and management
skills.
2- The Experienced Nurse \u2192 highly skilled in use of informatics to support
her practice.
3- Informatics Nurse Specialist \u2192 has advanced preparation in information
management, she focuses on applications to support nursing practice and use
skills in critical thinking, decision making and system development.
4- Innovator Nurse \u2192 Conducts informatics research and general informatics
theory and creative in developing solutions and has a sophisticated level of
understanding and skills in computer technology.
Administration \u2192 automated staff scheduling.
Education \u2192 Access to library and internet sources for students.
Research \u2192 Computerized literature searching.
Internet can provide marketing services such as job postings,
advertisment of health srvices, dissemenation and revision of product
information and on line risk assessment.
The emergence of the specialty known as nursing informatics is not a
recent phenomenon. That nurses have been using computers since the 1950s and
emerged as an advanced specialty in the 1980s. According to Graves and
computer science, information systems science, and nursing science. That
believed that information management processing of nursing data is achieved
through the collection of data, the transformation of nursing data into nursing
information, the finally into nursng knowledge.
when the nurse form a relationships between the raw data elements " form fully
picture of client's clinical status this is called "Nursing Information "
then the nurse acts on this information by formulating a set of interventions to
