Evolution and Role of Nursing Informatics in Patient Care
Grand Canyon University
NRS 450
2
History of Health Information Technologies
Health information technologies (HIT) were results of employer based health insurance
and federal funding back in 1940s. HIT took place in the hospitals for better patient outcome.
Beginning in the 1940s, nurses, along with operations researchers, industrial engineers,
hospital administrators, and public health officials, among others, began embracing the notion
that patient needs (Houston et al., 2019). Public health officials, nurses, and engineers started
to test different models and tools to improve health care quality. In 1976, the first
computerized medical system was implemented. In the early 1980s, nurses started to make
systems decisions independently and then it referred as nursing informatics. Conferences,
educations programs, and nursing organizations were developed to expertise in nursing
informatics (NI) and to train nurses for the further use of NI. Several years’ hard work and
promotion through articles helped NI establish a place in nursing profession. In 1992, Nursing
Informatics was recognized as a specialty practice by American Nurse Association. In this
, essay, we will explore history of IT, evolution of nursing informatics, how it improved patient
care , nursing role in health technology.
Importance of Clinical Informatics
Informatics is the science of usage of data, knowledge, information for better patient
outcome among healthcare services. Clinical informatics is the most relevant to day to day
nursing practice since it involves the patient care data such as electronic health records to
improve patient outcomes and better decision making. Electronic health records are digital
which has limited the use of papers for environment, and data is easily available among
different health care providers. Patients are able to get treatment sooner from specialist since
all the health data can be shared within few minutes among different providers. In addition,