Accelerating the Generation and Uptake of New Nursing Knowledge
Healthcare informatics has several means of accelerating the generation and spread of nursing knowledge. For example, Harper (2013) dwells on the way IT can accumulate the data on best practices (the author uses the example of staffing) and offer the opportunity to analyze it, thus producing evidence-based instructions and suggestions on the topic. Typically, I have the chance to use the output of such analyses; I have never been directly involved in this process of knowledge generation.
Also, Wrenn, Stein, Bakken, and Stetson (2010) point out the possibility and practice of using nursing IT to improve the coordination and communication of important knowledge between institutions and individual practitioners (p. 52). Mantalvo (2013) offers a specific case of such communication: benchmarking and reporting quality criteria, which exist because of the improved nation-wide communication and which offer individual institutions a more or less objective measurement of their performance.
Naturally, I have encountered this form of information sharing and communication; I tend to think that by standardizing the quality of care, we can ensure its continuous improvement nation-wide. According to Sipes (2016), healthcare informatics is transforming the way nurses use data and information, and, as can be seen from the presented examples, this change includes the acceleration of knowledge generation and communication.
Electronic Health Records: Pros and Cons
I chose to explain the benefits and drawbacks of Electronic Health Records (EHR) to a patient because my colleagues typically have some knowledge on the topic (even though they might want to expand it). Unfortunately, patients are mostly ignorant in this respect. As a result, I chose the advantages and disadvantages that, in my opinion, are central to patients.
In my experience, the main patient-related advantage of EHRs is their convenience: it is more convenient to enter the data since it is not hand-written and often does not require typing, it is easier to discern the information (since it is not hand-written), simpler to store (no more paper storages) and retrieve it (which is further facilitated through the use of tags and search options).
This convenience saves time and effort, which improves the quality of healthcare service. However, some issues are innate to EHRs. For example, there are significant dangers related to the security of information (including its possible loss and leakage). As a result, there is an ongoing agenda for the improvement of the EHRs data security with the help of planning, revising, and testing EHRs and possible eventualities (Hirsch, 2016).
EHRs Improvement Suggestions
I have been working as a nurse for twenty years, and I would say that even though I did come in contact with EHRs before, I used to know little about the way they worked and the way they can be improved. However, in my experience, everyone involved (from a patient to a doctor) is typically concerned with security issues.
They have a good reason for that: Hirsch (2016) informs that in 2014, 59 percent of hospitals “reported an unplanned EHR disruption” (para. 5). I remember two similar incidents because they affected my work. As a result, the main thing that I would like to check and improve in our information system is secure because I want to guarantee the safety of my patients’ information.
As for the issues that prevent EHRs from making the most out of the captured data, I think that the most important one is the redundancy problem. In my experience, healthcare workers are often instructed to produce it, for example, when information concerning the patient is repeated in the record and the visit note (typically for the sake of billing), but errors and copy-pasting also lead to it. The problem is currently being addressed by the medical informatics community (Wrenn et al., 2010), which is why we can hope to improve EHRs in the future and, possibly, contribute to the process by highlighting issues and reporting them to superiors and providers of the EHRs that we use.
References
Harper, E. M. (2013). The economic value of healthcare data. Nursing Administrator Quarterly, 37(2), 105–108. Web.
Hirsch, M. (2016). Hospitals ‘largely’ addressing HIPAA requirements for EHR contingency plans. Web.
Montalvo, I. (2013). How smart are your data? Nursing Management, 44(6), 23–24. Web.
Sipes, C. (2016). Project Management for the Advanced Practice Nurse. New York, NY: Springer.
Wrenn, J. O., Stein, D. M., Bakken, S., & Stetson, P. D. (2010). Quantifying clinical narrative redundancy in an electronic health record. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 17(1), 49–53. Web.