Nursing informatics is a specialty area that blends the power of data-driven technology with clinical practice, enabling nurses to use data insights to guide decision-making and create evidence-based treatment plans. When used responsibly and strategically, nursing informatics can improve the clinical experience for both healthcare providers and patients.
Nursing informatics is the driving force behind many modern approaches to clinical care. Through the use of automated and machine learning technology, informatics nurses can instantly extract data and glean insights that can expedite care and improve precision in clinical settings.
The data-driven insights that are revealed through nursing informatics strategies allow nurses across all specialty areas to leverage the power of technology in real-time. When minutes count, nursing informatics equips nurses with the instant information they need to make the right decisions.
At one time, nurses needed to focus primarily on honing the clinical skills required to care for patients at their bedside. In today's modern and evolving healthcare landscape, data literacy has become a core clinical skill — requiring nurses at all levels to understand how to extract, interpret, analyze, and utilize data in clinical settings.
Documentation has long played a pivotal role in safe and effective nursing practice, but nursing informatics allows nurse leaders to reduce documentation burden while improving precision and accuracy.
According to the American Nursing Informatics Association, nursing informaticists can work to analyze and reprioritize workflow in a way that improves operational efficiency and patient outcomes. Through standardized workflows, nurses can streamline care and maximize their use of available resources.
AI-driven technology complements nursing informatics strategies that reprioritize workflow, allowing nurses to instantly see where, when, and how they can improve workflow.
The key to implementing nursing informatics into clinical settings is utilizing accurate and relevant data. Prioritizing high-quality data allows both nursing informaticists and bedside nurses to make the best possible evidence-based decisions.
Structured fields should be used more frequently than unstructured data, as they enable nurses to quickly review and analyze the most relevant data. Free text may provide added context, but it is more difficult to process and takes longer to apply when making clinical decisions.
According to research published in the Applied Clinical Informatics Journal, the data quality habits that healthcare organizations adopt have a direct impact on their ability to provide safe and effective care. Collecting accurate, high-quality data and storing it securely is crucial to any nursing informatics strategy.
Prioritizing the dashboards that are most relevant and applicable to bedside nurses allows healthcare facilities to maximize their use of available data.
Advanced digital tools allow bedside and charge nurses to access relevant data and streamline their workflow each day. For example, a fall prevention dashboard can be used by bedside nurses to protect the most vulnerable patients from injuring themselves while under clinical care.
Nurse managers and clinical coordinators may rely on specific dashboards to monitor quality improvement metrics and develop strategies that reduce burnout in their nurses. For instance, nurse unit leaders may rely on dashboards that allow them to monitor and reduce near miss rates in their facilities.
Minimum viable metrics (MVM) refer to the core metrics required to enact data-driven decision-making. While MVM is used widely in product development, it is relevant in nursing as well.
Daily process metrics can be used to measure the effectiveness of bedside nurses. Key daily process metrics include percentage of hourly rounds completed on time, percentage of nurses who adhere to hand hygiene compliance, and medication administration accuracy rates.
Weekly outcome metrics can be used by charge nurses and nurse managers to evaluate the quality of care that patients are receiving. Weekly outcome metrics to monitor include near miss rate, pain management effectiveness, fall rate, and rate of hospital-acquired infections.
Data-driven insights also enable nurse leaders and healthcare administrators to verify that the facility is providing accessible and equitable care. Some of the most useful equity metrics in healthcare include screening rates based on ZIP code, missed appointment rates, charity care provision rates, and immunization rates based on demographic information.
Nursing informatics enables the implementation of rapid feedback loops, in which nurses can gain access to data in real-time and use it to make immediate improvements in care.
Clinical dashboards for nursing allow nurses to leverage the power of data in real-time. During unit huddles, nurses can use these dashboards to highlight and analyze the most recent data and work collaboratively to develop solutions that can be quickly implemented.
The Plan-Do-Study Act method is ideal for nurses who are looking to implement data-driven solutions in their workflow. The PDSA cycle in nursing is an intuitive process that allows nurses to evaluate the impact of change.
Even nurses that do not specialize in informatics will need to develop the data analysis skills required to successfully incorporate data-driven insights into their nursing practice.
Primarily, nurses need to hone their communication skills and align their questions with the best practices for implementing data-driven insights into clinical settings. Data-savvy nurses know how to ask about patient outcomes, equity metrics, and resource allocation.
Nurses need to be able to use visual tools to interpret data and improve clinical care techniques. Nurses who actively work to hone their visual literacy skills can reduce medical errors, mitigate risks in clinical settings, and improve the safety of care provided.
Interoperability in nursing occurs when multiple health systems exchange patient health information and data. Interoperability has become the norm in the modern healthcare system, as healthcare providers work to collaborate to provide patient-centered care.
Structured hand-offs occur when healthcare providers transfer care to another provider, such as when a primary care provider refers a patient to a specialist. Within the scope of nursing informatics, an SBAR data handoff occurs when one health system provides health data about a patient to another unit or facility.
Efficient and secure hand-offs are required to support care transitions, and are crucial to successful interoperability. In a landscape where patients expect comprehensive, whole-person care, these transitions must be seamless.
Documentation has never been more important. Data-driven insights can support high-quality documentation while reducing the documentation burden on nurses.
Nursing informatics can support the automation of safety event reporting and near-miss reporting, ensuring that nurse leaders have access to the critical data that they need to improve safety in clinical care environments.
Patient education tools also can be used to measure the safety and efficacy of care in clinical settings. For example, the patient education teachback method can be used strategically to improve adherence and outcomes while also producing quantifiable data that nurse informaticists can analyze.
Nurses who specialize in informatics often bridge the gap that exists between care providers and information technology professionals. By collaborating with IT professionals in healthcare systems, nurse informaticists can improve data access and quality.
IT professionals can work with nurses to build data-driven applications that best support their roles. By creating dashboards that are intuitive and easy to use, nurse informatics specialists can support data-driven change within their organizations.
Nurse informatics specialists also need to work with healthcare administrators to develop policies and protocols for managing and using healthcare data in their facilities.
Data privacy and security should be at the forefront of any nursing informatics strategy. Nurse informaticists should rely on industry guidelines and ethical standards to enact data-driven strategies that are fair, equitable, and secure.
One of the best ways to improve data privacy and security is to ensure that only nurses who need it have access to the data. Role-based access security is recommended to protect patient privacy.
Metrics that evaluate bias and fairness in healthcare settings should be used regularly to ensure that all data are used in ways that support health equity overall. Nurse informatics specialists should recognize that bias can exist in data-driven algorithms, and they should enact strategies that seek to reduce and eliminate that bias.
Nurses who specialize in informatics will often take on a coaching role in clinical units, as they work to share information about data-driven insights with their colleagues and help them adapt to new technology.
Described as an on-demand learning approach, just-in-time learning is widely used in nursing as it allows nursing informatics specialists to teach bedside and charge nurses how to use data-driven technology at the point of care. It's a hands-on, real-time learning method that can be highly effective.
When it comes to improving data literacy in clinical units, ongoing support is often required. Nurse informaticists will often have to create training programs that enable nurses to improve their skills and continue to adapt to new technology.
Start at the bedside. Choose one process you follow daily, such as pain reassessment compliance, and track it for a week. Create a tiny dashboard tile or list, and discuss this data set in huddles.
Use templates and favorites that mirror care plans, remove duplicate fields, and batch documents with end-of-shift summaries. Then, you can partner with informatics specialists to retire low-value clicks.
A good nursing dashboard answers one question per widget, such as "Who needs ambulation now?" In addition, it offers real-time updates, uses clear thresholds, and fits on a single screen for the intended role.
Some of the metrics that measure most include pain reassessment, compliance and timeliness, ambulation attempts, patient education teach-back completion, and medication reconciliation.
To prevent misleading conclusions, use rates with correct denominators, compare like-for-like shifts, and show trends. Avoid using a single data point, and review outliers for data-entry errors.
Yes, frontline nurses can influence EMR design through nursing data champions, build councils, and pilot groups. When collaborating, bring screenshots, user stories, and a simple return on investment, such as the number of minutes saved or errors reduced.
You can improve equity in your nursing dashboards by adding filters for language and interpreter use and reviewing outcomes by demographic groups. Rather than using data to label your patients, use it to close the equity gaps that continue to exist.
As nurse leaders continue to work to reduce the documentation burden on bedside nurses, and as health administrators rely more heavily on quality improvement metrics to improve workflow, nursing informatics will take center stage in the years to come. Now is the best time to prepare for this growing specialty area in nursing.
The Division of Pre-Licensure Nursing at Indiana Wesleyan University offers several degree programs that provide aspiring nurses with the foundation they need to begin their practice. The RN to BSN online degree at IWU is designed for registered nurses who want to advance their education and explore key specialty areas, and the BSN to DNP online degree is ideal for nurses who want to pursue advanced practice registered nurse positions.
On our Christ-centered campus, you will find that service and empathy are embedded in all our degree programs. Request more information about the IWU experience today.
