Nurse Informaticists Get It Done

Introduction

Problem Statement: Increasing clinical data exchange, poor content, and policies create frustrations and patient care challenges.Technology innovations and health information exchange enhancements have increased accessibility of data while inadvertently accentuating data quality issues. Patients are now technology consumers with their medical devices that are now connected to their electronic health record (EHR). Nurses are the first to identify technology challenges with the patient as they explore the clinical portals and the potential confusion with external data. The EHR technology guides the clinician through data capture and generates the data exchange, whether fax or HL7 message. Nurses are now realizing that the data often shared has only a visual display, not discrete data elements for EHR entities to consume. Many challenges include patient portal functionality that is inconsistent across multiple platforms; interoperability of patient medical/mobile devices; time and effort required to educate the patient about data differences; and organizational policies for medical devices, data exchange, and data provenance.Nurse informaticists are positioned to make sense of real-time information and are rich sources of innovative ways to provide leadership that improves and enhances patient care.
Impactful leadership methods for nursing informatics: Embracing new ideas and methodologies will empower and support nurses ensuring clinical data integrity will enhance patient-centered care along the healthcare continuum through the following: development, engagement, and enforcement of policies, rules, and regulations related to data exchange; conduction of transparent data quality reviews followed by education; usability of analysis and results; collaboration with entire healthcare ecosystem to repair identified issues and poor data content; and discussion of change management methodology. Nurses can drive change management by participating in vendor user groups as advocate for high clinical data quality which will improve both clinician and patient satisfaction; providing input to establish evidence-based best practices; identifying data gaps and the development of action plans to improve interoperability; application of nursing clinical and institutional knowledge to develop healthcare policies that advocate for patients, consumers, nurses, and all involved in clinical care.
Empower clinical transformation: Transformation in a healthcare organization is possible through participation and empowerment of the entire staff population and establishing practices and policies that leverage technology, (artificial intelligence/analytics) to automate time consuming tasks that are prone to error, thus reducing manpower and operational cost; foster an environment of change and improvement through work groups that guide policy changes; create a community of trust between partners, vendors, and organizations that builds the value-added proposition; and advocate for policies and procedures that build patient/provider trust and data quality improvement.
Conclusion: To affect change across the patient experience, the entire healthcare ecosystem must embrace positive transformations of policy and technology while empowering those involved in direct clinical care. Working together they can create an environment of awareness to improve clinical data quality through engagement and thereby increase success in patient centered care and satisfaction.