Discussion: Interaction Between Nurse Informatics and Other Specialists

Discussion: Interaction Between Nurse Informatics and Other Specialists

Anyway, the opposite of that coin, however, is to force a standardized system on everyone. That is what is puzzling me – would that work?  Unless it was mandated, would it take forever for organizations to embrace it? Building a home-grown system from scratch, like my 1980s system, involves buy-in and cooperation from everyone, and can actually incorporate everyone’s needs. So if, for example, the nurses want to be able to document using a standardized nursing language, they can pick the one they like, have the vendor of the EHR build it into their system, and the nurse informaticist can review it each step of the way and champion the nurses’ needs during the process.

But it does seem like this is then mandating what will be used, and more or less forcing a system on everyone that they may not like.

And yet it seems that many of the vendors are doing just that – forcing their system on poor unsuspecting organizations who are making the erroneous assumption that the vendors know what they are doing.  They do not – they are selling a product. The less they have to adapt to an organization, the more profit for them (Mooney & Boyle, 2011).

Kind of an interesting twist to this is that some of the nursing standardized languages can be adapted pretty easily to medical diagnoses and then that might help with physician buy in (Johnson et al., 2012).

But the main take away is that the organization should really shy away from just using what the vendor already has up its sleeve. IMHO.  And the nurse informaticist needs to be on top of the information so he or she can steer the organization away from a vendor system that is not right for them.

What do you think?

Nice work!

References

Johnson, M., Moorhead, S., Bulechek, G., Butcher, H., Maas, M., & Swanson, E.  (2012). NOC and NIC linkages to NANDA-I and clinical conditions.  Maryland Heights, MO: Elsevier Mosby.