NR_361 Week 8 Discussion, AACN Essentials Informatics Self-Assessment

NR_361 Week 8 Discussion, AACN Essentials Informatics Self-Assessment How far have you come? How will you apply this information to continue to improve your informatics knowledge in nursing practice? Hello Professor and Class, My AACN Essentials Self-Assessment score 8 weeks ago was 22 and now it is a 35. This class has opened my eyes in which technology can enhance my professional nursing practice. I learned quickly that that Nursing Informatics (NI) is the application of computer and information science to nursing (Hebda & Czar, 2013. p.8). In the report “Wisdom at Work” it emphasized the need to use technology in order to simplify the work of a nurse, not complicate it. Technology rich environments make it easier for nurses to enhance direct patient care with use of electronic medical records, automated safety alerts such as call bells, and using smart technology to simplify communication (Hebda & Czar, 2013. p. 20). Just yesterday, a new employee rounded on our medical/surgical floor and introduced herself as a “Nursing Informatics Specialist”. This is a brand new position for our hospital, and her goal is to help bridge the gap between information systems and nursing in order to ensure new applications and features are beneficial and useable to the nursing staff. She demonstrated the launch of a new phone app that we currently use on our desk top systems to communicate with physicians. It allows us to send physicians secure encrypted messages from our smart phones. There is a drop-down phone list of providers that with just the touch of their name, opens a new secure message. Patient information is populated by simply scanning a patient arm band, and from there a secure message can be sent. This application will be a huge time saver because now we have to stop what we are doing, locate a secure desk top, search for the provider, and manually enter the patient name, date of birth, medical record number, and room number before we can send a message. Technology such as this is a huge time saver which I will utilize often. I look forward to being part of the growth in this field. Danielle REFERENCES Hebda, T., & Czar, P. (n.d.). Handbook of Informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals (Fifth ed.). 2013: Pearson.