Module 1: Introduction to Nursing Informatics

• The digital age has seen a pervasive increase in how we communicate and process information due to the convergence of the telecommunications and computer industry.
• Nursing informatics provides a nursing perspective, illuminates nursing values and beliefs, denotes a practice base for nurses in health informatics, produces unique knowledge, distinguishes groups of practitioners, focuses on the phenomena of interest for nursing, and provides needed nursing language and word context to health informatics.
• Integrated systems support evidence-based nursing practice, facilitate nurses’ participation in the health care team, and document nurses’ contribution to patient care outcomes.
• Nurses are major stakeholders in health care and based on their knowledge, they translate data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom.
• For greater achievement in nursing practice, nurses need to desire and adopt innovative means to make their contribution to the patient care process and patient outcome visible.
• Information science is a science and practice dealing with the effective collection, storage, retrieval, and use of information.
• Information science is concerned with recordable information and knowledge, and the technologies and related services that facilitate their management and use.
• Information science is a multidisciplinary science that involves aspects from computer science, cognitive science, social science, communication science, and library science to deal with obtaining, gathering, organizing, manipulating, managing, storing, retrieving, recapturing, disposing of, distributing, or broadcasting information.
• Information science studies everything that deals with information and can be defined as the study of information systems.
• Information science originated as a sub-discipline of computer science, in an attempt to understand and rationalize the management of technology within organizations.
• Information science is taught at all major universities and business schools around the world.
• Information science has matured into a major field of management that is increasingly being emphasized as an important area of research in management studies and has expanded to examine the human-computer interaction, interfacing, and interaction of people, information systems, and corporations.
• Organizations have become intensely aware of the fact that information and knowledge are potent resources that must be cultivated and honed to meet their needs.
• In the mid-1980s, Blum introduced the concepts of data, information and knowledge as a framework for understanding clinical information systems and their impact on health care.
• Information science focuses on why and how technology can be put to best use to serve the information flow within the organization.
• Nursing Informatics, seen in literature in the 1980s, including a definition of combining nursing, information, and computer sciences for managing and processing data into knowledge for using in nursing practice (Murphy, 2010).
• Nursing informatics focuses on the representation of nursing data, information, knowledge, and wisdom as well as the management and communication of nursing information within the broader context of health informatics.
• A patient in nursing informatics refers to consumers in both a wellness and illness model.
• The function of nursing informatics is the design and use of informatics solutions and/or technology to support all areas of nursing, including, but not limited to, the direct provision of care, establishing effective administrative systems, designing useful decision support systems, managing and delivering educational experiences, enhancing supporting lifelong learning, and supporting nursing research.
• In 1994, The American Nurses Association (ANA) began developing a statement to describe and define the scope of nursing informatics.
• Staggers and Thompson (2022) defined nursing informatics as a specialty with the goal to improve the health of populations, communities, families, and individuals by optimizing information management and communication.
• Nursing informatics is one example of a discipline-specific informatics practice within the broader category of health informatics.
• Nursing informatics has become well established within nursing since its recognition as a specialty for registered nurses by the American Nurses Association (ANA) in 1992.
• The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) defines nursing informatics as a science and practice that integrates nursing, its information and knowledge, and their management, with information and communication technologies to promote the health of people, families, and communities worldwide.
• The support provided by NI is accomplished using information structures, information processes, and information technology.
• Nursing informatics (NI) is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice.
• NI supports consumers, patients, nurses, and other providers in their decision making in all roles and settings.
• The American Nurses Association (2008) definition of nursing informatics states that it is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice.
• Individuals in nursing informatics refer to patients, healthcare consumers, and any other recipient of nursing care or informatics solutions.