Nursing Informatics Analysis

Informatics is part of the knowledge and skills a nurse must have to be successful in the healthcare field. The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) recommends informatics as a nursing competency for nursing students to develop in undergraduate academic programs. With the influx of patient numbers, the emergence and expansion of new medical procedures, medical discoveries, and an elaborate healthcare system, informatics is inevitable. Health informatics combines healthcare, informational science, and utilization of computer technology to integrate patient health records. Since its realization in the 1950s, health informatics has become a critical component of healthcare system that enhances patient management and safety. Informatics
Nursing informatics aids in the delivery of quality patient care, hence, nurses should have a basic understanding of the informatics system in line with the emerging needs and demand for its use. Informatics in nursing educational curriculum allows the use of computer science, informational science and cognitive science for managing and promoting secure healthcare data, knowledge, wisdom, and information necessary to promote patient care and the nursing profession (Knebel & Greiner, 2003). Through this system, nurses can get access to epidemiological data on incidence rates, prevention, and control of new emerging diseases, and associated mortality and morbidity rates (Booth, 2016). The Technology Informatics Guiding Reforms (TIGER) and Quality Education for Nurses (QSEN) recommend that all nurses should have the basic computer skills and computer software application knowledge to help manage, process, communicate, and browse with ease for a better service delivery (Booth, 2016). Nursing documentation is an essential aspect of patient care; therefore, nurses need to use their knowledge of patient conditions and integrate it with an evidenced-based practice that is founded on data collected and stored through the informatics system to enhance patient care (McGonigle et al., 2014). Since nursing care mostly relates to the needs of patients and the availability of reliable data, the nursing practice, thus, embraces the system and seeks to maintain quality patient care based on the advancement of this system that provides data with specific conditions and requirements of the patients. Clinical research informatics helps in research studies that provide new patient management techniques using existing data. Informatics thus provides the useful data, which can enable development of research aimed at improving the quality of