Summarize how informatics has impacted or changed nursing practice. Provide an example from your professional experience.     

Summarize how informatics has impacted or changed nursing practice. Provide an example from your professional experience.     

     Informatics has a huge influence on nursing practice. It is how agencies like Joint Commission audits patient care. For example, in my own experience, if a patient in the unit had a pressure ulcer/injury that was acquired while in the unit the hospital was not reimbursed for their care. How this information was audited, was by the admission note. If the patient has a pressure ulcer/injury in the nursing admission assessment, then the hospital would be reimbursed. If this was not in the nursing admission assessment, then it was hospital-acquired and the facility was not reimbursed for the care of the injury. We at one time in the ICU had an influx of new staff and pressure ulcers/injuries were being missed and the facility was losing a large amount of funding. As a result, we had informatics create a need for a cosigner on the note. This caused the nurses to have two RNs assess the skin upon admission instead of one. It helped significantly with our pressure ulcers/injuries noted upon admission. It also helped increase the facility’s funding. This also helped to improve patient care. Informatics help improves patient safety, budget, and documentation.

     On the other hand, I have worked with informatics and had a hard time getting the computer to do what I needed it to do. An article talks about how information is continually trying to improve “computer language” (Cesnik & Kidd, 2010). it is sometimes difficult for the individual to communicate with the computer in the proper language to get it to do what is need (Cesnik & Kidd, 2010). Therefore, it is key to work with informatics to help improve this process.