Informaticians act as translators between staff who work in different disciplines. With their help, different data turns into a standardized language making different systems interoperable (for example, linking the EHR and Disease Surveillance) (Public Health Informatics Institute, 2017). In doing so, these specialists help information communications happen in an effective, timely manner.
One of the core ideas of informaticians’ mission is to create a common dictionary from a set of various disciplinary codes (Public Health Informatics Institute, 2017). Thus, informatics in healthcare improves and enhances knowledge management for a common goal of patients’ wellbeing.
Nurses play a key role in the knowledge communication system of a medical organization. Moreover, nursing practitioners are faced with the need to constantly communicate with patients and respond to changes in their indicators. As Nagle et al. (2017) state, “From the provision of executive oversight, project management, systems education and training, and analytics, nurses in clinical settings have become core to organizations’ information management infrastructure and support” (p. 214-215).
With the development of online technology, self-tracking devices, and digital health, it has become vital to develop nursing skills to integrate their knowledge with up-to-date healthcare technologies. Sweeney (2017) defines nursing informatics as “a specialty that integrates nursing, science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice” (para. 1). From this definition, the vital role of this new subset of informatics becomes apparent: in order to improve the knowledge management process, i.e., translations between different languages, there should be an interdisciplinary specialist in the workforce of a medical organization.
I consider a hypothetical scenario of a medical organization that has a strict vertical hierarchy and, for this reason, experiences problems in knowledge management. Because of this problem, there have been some medical mistakes and paper overload. The recognition of this problem leads to the plan of knowledge management and communication transformation. The new system would be centered around a particular patient, thus organizing the data flows and management within particular inter-organizational teams which include a shared network of medical professionals, patients, their relatives, and digital devices.
The crucial role of integrating different data flows into one common ‘dictionary’ will belong to nursing informaticians. Such reorganization of health knowledge data flows management will decrease the number of mistakes and improve interdisciplinary communication within and outside the medical organization.
References
Nagle, L. M., Sermeus, W., Junger, A., & Bloomberg, L. S. (2017). Evolving role of the nursing informatics specialist. In J. Murphy et al. (Eds.), Forecasting informatics competencies for nurses in the future of connected health (212-221). 2017 IMIA and IOS Press
Public Health Informatics Institute. (2017). Public health informatics: “translating” knowledge for health. [Video]. Youtube. Web.
Sweeney, J. (2017). Healthcare informatics. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 21(1). Web.