NSG 3039 Week 4 Project Informatics in the Clinical Setting Patient Safety and Quality of Care

NSG 3039 Week 4 Project Informatics in the Clinical Setting Patient Safety and Quality of Care

Health technologies are designed for different yet critical functions in healthcare. These include improving patient safety, streamlining work process and enhancement of quality and outcomes (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018). Miss Weinstein was categorical that informatics as part of the health technologies is essential in improving patient safety and quality in any healthcare setting. For instance, she says that her responsibilities include building risk assessment tools for different events like falls and medication errors. working with a team of quality improvement, the informatics nurse was categorical that it is essential for such tools to have certain measures that allow end-users to understand its effectiveness. Through this tool nurses can ask several questions to assess the frequency and susceptibility of an individual to falls or risk of falling. After the assessment of these factors, a computerized system calculates a fall risk score to determine the kind of interventions required for a particular patient. Some of these interventions include proximity to nursing station, camera monitoring and use of bed alarm among others. The tool and its interventions are focused on enhancing patient safety and quality of care.

A critical part of her duties and responsibilities entails making sure that the EHRs system is user-friendly and incorporates critical components of effective and quality care. The aim of the EHR system is to reduce time taken to chart on patients and increase the time nurses spend in offering quality patient care. However, the nurse was categorical that despite the increased and effective use of EHR, errors still occur when using the technology and informatics. These include human factors and other significant challenges.

Human Factors and Challenges

Human factors in healthcare environment are about how people interact with technologies in particular situations. Despite safety measures, and protocols, health systems and personnel cannot avoid human errors as some of the human factors in care provision (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018). Miss Weinstein and I discussed about the human factors and other challenges in the organization and others that she has encountered when dealing with nurses who develop loopholes that they can exploit despite the existing quality measures. The most prevalent loophole is the use of patient and medication barcode scanning system. For instance, nurses do not scan patient’s wristband at the bedside but instead place stickers with the barcode on their report sheets. They also scan medications in the hallway before administering. In some instances, they leave the medications’ packages so that they can scan after administering the drugs. These actions defeat the need for safety measures developed by the informatics team to enhance quality care and reduce incidences of medication errors.

The nurse says that another significant human factor has been resistance from the management to help nurses build the EHR system since it is relatively new. Weinstein believes that allowing nurses to manage the system would be essential in helping them make suggestions to make it more user-friendly and meet the stated healthcare goals. However, the management introduced the system with minimal engagement and involvement of nurses leading to significant yet an avoidable aspect. The resistance stems from the inability to use the system and ineffective training. The system’s use also faces network and wireless issues like downtimes that require effective upgrade of the entire EHR in the facility (O’connor et al., 2017). The informatics also discussed complaints from nurses about the delays that they witness when charting; a situation that prolongs time to serve patients. Her future goal is to improve the system and network, train nurses adequately and ensure that the network has the right speed. More fundamentally, she stresses the need for nurses to have a hands-on approach to providing care for their patients and reducing time spent on technological devices like their smartphones.

Insight Gained from the Interview

The interview was critical in understanding and appreciating the role played by informatics and other health technologies to improve patient safety and quality of care in healthcare settings. The interview provided an opportunity for me to understand the critical role that informatics nurses play in health care settings; especially developing interventions to enhance overall safety (O’connor t al., 2017). Informatics plays a critical role in developing electronic health record systems to improve care delivery and make nurses’ work simple and easy. I also realized that implementing measures and systems to enhance quality and safety requires the involvement and participation of nurses as end-users since the