Nurses’ Involvement With IT Systems Increasing

Nurses’ Involvement With IT Systems Increasing

April 30, 2007

As hospitals continue to develop and adopt electronic health record systems, the demand for nurse informaticists, who can serve as a link between IT and clinical care, has increased, the Dallas Morning News reports.

At least 75% of nurse informaticists are developing or helping their health care facilities adopt clinical information or documentation systems, according to an industry survey. However, so few nurses have doctoral degrees in informatics that nursing schools are having difficulty finding qualified faculty to help train new nurses for the role.

“Many nurses working in nursing informatics roles learn on the job, building on their nursing experience with information management,” Poldi Tschirch, director of nursing informatics at the University of Te xas Medical Branch at Galveston, said.

Patricia Dykes, head of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s nursing informatics committee, said, “I see a wider recognition of the value that nurses with advanced education in informatics bring to system design, implementation and evaluation.”

Though beneficial, some nurses and other health care providers can get an IT position without formal certification, Valerie Anderson, a registered nurse and a patient care manager at Baylor Health System in Dallas, said.

“It is not enough to have programmers and engineers designing and implementing these systems,” Mary Beth Mitchell, director of clinical informatics at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, said (Kreimer, Dallas Morning News, 4/29).