Hospital C is looking to implement an EHR. It has been suggested that a NIS be hired. This position does not involve direct patient care and the administration is struggling with how to justify the position. How can this position be justified?

Similar to other nursing specialties or roles, such as surgical, pediatric, triage, family care, or many other responsibilities, informatics plays a vital role in the healthcare field and should be treated as such. Nurses in the informatics unit do not impact patients directly. However, the facility cannot survive without their input. Thus, other care staff should not think the nurse informatics has no role to play in patient care. The following are some of the roles of nurse informatics, which can be used to justify their posts.

First, nurse informaticists are responsible for designing information systems that can be used to improve the quality of care. One of the systems that have been designed and developed by the help of nurse informaticist is electronic health records (EHRs). Collins et al. (2017) note that the informaticist must be included in such projects because they have the ability to include what nurses and patients need in the design.

Together with IT experts, nurse informaticists ensure that all healthcare systems, such as EHRs and other telehealth, are operating smoothly without hitches. In other words, they are responsible for maintaining the systems and updating the ones that need security updates. Another vital role of informatics is to manipulate healthcare data so that ordinary nurses and understand and interpret it (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017).

Some people may think that the role of nurse informaticists can be conducted by any other nurse in the facility. However, this is not true; the roles mentioned above cannot be performed by people with little or no knowledge in healthcare informatics.

Conclusion

One of the things that have been noted in this assignment is that ordinary nurses should have some knowledge of nursing informatics roles. However, the organization should employ informatics to work on nurse informatics. The paper has also found that common terminology facilitates communication between healthcare providers regardless of their region or level of education. However, the model has made nursing communication more formal, and thus reduced informal interactions between the professionals.

References

Collins, S., Yen, P. Y., Phillips, A., & Kennedy, M. K. (2017). Nursing informatics competency assessment for the nurse leader: The Delphi study. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 47(4), 212-218. DOI: 10.1097/NNA.0000000000000467