Policy and Guidelines for the Informatics Staff: Making Decisions to Use in Oncology

The oncology nurse informaticist role varies in scope and responsibility from the front line manager to the nursing executive.3 Nursing leaders need to understand the roles and responsibilities of their peers in order to facilitate interprofessional coordination and communication.

During the first NURS FPX 6412 Assessment 1 Policy and Guidelines for the Informatics Staff: Making Decisions to Use Informatics Systems in Practice of surveys, participants recommended changes to wording or grouping for 34 competencies, and two were deleted. Several competencies were also found redundant.

Policy and Guidelines

From patient portal systems to electronic medical records, nurses and their patients are surrounded by technology that can help to streamline processes, collect data more quickly and effectively, and even assist in research. However, the reality is that many of these tools are not fully implemented and often fail to meet the needs of the nursing staff (Norris, Hinrichs & Brown). This is because there is usually a gap between the technology available and how it is actually used.

It is this gap that informatics addresses by incorporating the information science and computer science disciplines into all aspects of nursing practice, management, leadership and education. According to the ANA, nursing informatics (NI) encompasses “the application of information technology in all settings of health care delivery and clinical research, to promote optimal NURS FPX 5003 Assessment 1 Identifying Community Health Needs quality and improve outcomes” (ANA, 2015b).

In fact, the nursing profession’s engagement with data dates back to 1850 when Florence Nightingale started using statistical information to help improve sanitation practices. However, it wasn’t until much later that a more focused approach to data collection was applied in a nursing context, and the field of nursing informatics was born.

The ANA recognizes the need to advance NI in order to meet these broader healthcare needs, and it has developed a set of Principles and Policy Positions NURS FPX 6614 Assessment 3 Disseminating the Evidence Scholarly Video Media Submission support this goal. As part of your assignment, select one healthcare policy and study it through a nursing informatics lens.

Identifying Community Health Needs

As hospitals face new requirements to demonstrate community benefit, it’s important that they listen to their communities—old and new partners—about the needs and assets of their area. A community health needs assessment (CHNA) is an excellent place to start and can help guide a hospital’s strategy for community change. CHNAs can be broad, examining a community at large, or they can focus on specific community issues such as opioid and substance use disorders, a challenge many communities face.

A CHNA should be a collaborative process that includes stakeholders from across the community, a mix of organizations and individuals with different experiences, knowledge and skills. The definition of the community should also be broad and dynamic to encompass people who may not be formally engaged in efforts to improve their community’s health status. Several included studies NURS FPX 6410 Assessment 1 Presentation to Informatics Staff that community involvement is critical to the success of community health improvement initiatives.

The IOM model for a community health profile, highlighted in the Problem Identification and Prioritization Cycle of Figure 1, serves as a useful framework to help communities prioritize their needs. It emphasizes that population health is a shared responsibility between governmental public health agencies, private health care providers and many other community institutions. Because of this shared responsibility, a community profile should include outcome measures and measures of the determinants and factors that influence health outcomes as well as process measures such as screening rates and risk-adjusted mortality indicators.

Disseminating the Evidence

Through Scholarly Video Media Submission, you can share your research with a global audience of researchers, students and the general public. This process of scientific dissemination can help to promote a more equitable and inclusive way of communicating with diverse audiences.

Nursing informatics is a nursing specialty that uses information technology to improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes. Nurse informaticists are an essential part of healthcare transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, assisting health systems in creating new clinical workflows and establishing best practices for deploying emerging technologies to combat the disease.

One example is the use of an electronic system for documenting medication administration, or eMAR. The system reduces the amount of paperwork that needs to be completed by nurses, and allows for a more accurate record to be kept of medications given to patients. An informatics nurse specialist conducts a focus group with staff nurses to gather feedback on this new system. She asks NURS FPX 8014 Assessment 1 Nongovernmental Agency Involved in Global Issues nurses to explain how they use their current system and how they think this new one will affect their work. She is demonstrating which ANA informatics competency?

Another important nursing informatics skill is ensuring that data are validated before they can be considered valid and evidence-based. This involves comparing and analyzing data from various sources, including research studies, patient care reports, and national and local standards. It also involves interpreting how the results of this data might be applied to daily practice and making recommendations for improvement.

Presentation to Informatics Staff

The nursing informatics specialty has become increasingly a part of the healthcare workforce, especially in hospitals and multifacility health systems. This nursing specialty combines healthcare sciences, computer science and information science in order to use technology to improve data management. For example, a cardiologist recently applied this information science expertise to a database of echocardiography reports from the past decade, and within minutes identified 54,000 patients nurs fpx 4040 assessment 1 nursing informatics in health care valvular heart disease. This process would take physicians years to do manually. The same specialized informatics practice is also being used to provide the infrastructure and biomedical informatics expertise for NCI Precision Medicine Initiatives, clinical trial reporting systems and cancer data standards, registries and repositories. These efforts are being augmented by semantic resources to enable standards-based interoperability of research and clinical data.