Informatics in Healthcare
Technological advances and the need for privacy and confidentiality with patients’ information in the health sector led to the implementation of CIS to pass information from one person to the other. Informatics is used to keep electronic health records of patients while providing security to the information shared (Cassano, 2014). Professional nurses use informatics to maintain patient healthcare records while sharing knowledge among themselves. This paper explores the significance of the clinical information system and the role of professional nurses in the management of patients’ information in health centers.
In most cases, patients visit different hospitals at different times when sick. Informatics has helped nurses in hospitals retrieve patients’ history, to determine their previous illnesses and examine their current conditions for proper treatment (Arab Zozani et al. 2015). Also, informatics helps improve coordination among nurses. This happens in cases where different nurses have served a single patient. History shared with all practitioners can easily be retrieved by the use of information systems. Moreover, the system also performs a critical function in securing the confidentiality of patients in healthcare (Iyengar, Kundu & Pallis, 2018). Patients share private information that, if leaked to the public, might result in stigmatization of the patients. Nursing informatics is used to pass information and secure it from landing to the wrong hands to ensure the information shared is safe. However, in a case where s medical practitioner has overlooked a medical alert from the records, future medics might be misinformed about the patient’s condition. The information gap prevents patients from getting the necessary services needed, resulting in death.
To conclude, informatics will help connect patients with different medical practitioners since medical records are preserved and protected and available whenever needed. In the future, informatics will improve patients’ safety and better healthcare. Therefore, professional nurses need to make good use of information systems while caring for the patients and ensure that information stored is helpful to other medics who will handle the patients. Professional nurses should feed the right information to the system to help in improving health and medical care to patients.
References
Arab Zozani, M., Bagheri Faradonbeh, S., & Jaafari Pooyan, E. (2015). The Role of health technology assessment in improving healthcare quality. Journal of Payavard Salamat, 9(4), 400-414. http://payavard.tums.ac.ir/browse.php?a_id=5839&sid=1&slc_lang=en
Cassano, C. (2014). The right balance-technology and patient care. On-Line Journal of Nursing Informatics, 18(3). https://search.proquest.com/openview/7f8a61922cf3dd18bf3d335d56157ce6/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2034896
Iyengar, A., Kundu, A., & Pallis, G. (2018). Healthcare informatics and privacy. IEEE Internet Computing, 22(2), 29-31. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8345561/