Survey indicates high value of informatics nurses
Informatics nurses are taking a greater role in healthcare delivery and have a significant impact on patient safety and overall care, as well as delivering workflow and productivity improvements.
Those are the findings of HIMSS' 2015 Impact of the Informatics Nurse Survey which polled nearly 600 participants including C-suite executives, clinical analysts and informatics nurses.
Sixty percent of respondents believe that informatics nurses have a high degree of impact on the quality of care provided to patients and the majority said their organization had hired an informatics professional in a leadership capacity. Twenty percent of respondents said their organization has a chief nursing information officer.
“The 2015 Impact of the Informatics Nurse Survey showcases the positive influence informatics nurses are having on improved quality and efficiency of patient care,” said Joyce Sensmeier, HIMSS vice president of informatics, in a release. “We are going to continue to see the role and use of technology expand in healthcare and the demand for nurses with informatics training will grow in parallel. As clinicians further focus on transforming information into knowledge, technology will be a fundamental enabler of future care delivery models and nursing informatics leaders will be essential to this transformation.”
As healthcare provider organizations look to build upon their EHR solution to leverage data analytics and population health management tools to transition to a true learning health system, nurses will continue to play an important role in the process, according to HIMSS. Key findings from the survey reinforce that participants believe that informatics nurses bring value to the implementation phase (85 percent) and optimization phase (83 percent) of clinical systems processes.
Informatics nurses are beginning to play a critical role in ensuring user acceptance (75%) and the appropriate adoption of emerging technologies, according to the survey. Seventy percent of respondents agreed that nurses play an important role in medical device integration.
Access the complete survey.
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.