The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies

Chronic lifestyle conditions such as hypertension and diabetes are one of the leading causes of mortality globally. This is a cause of worry for the healthcare industry and policymakers. Many patients are diagnosed with lifestyle conditions daily, while millions are unaware that they have these conditions. The top lifestyle conditions affecting millions of individuals in the United States are diabetes, obesity, and hypertension (Lankarani & Assari, 2017). These statistics are alarming since these conditions are the leading causes of mortalities in the United States. These statistics show the need to improve efforts to combat these lifestyle conditions. These efforts may include public health promotion, patient follow-up, and provision of quality healthcare services. Accordingly, this can be achieved by incorporating health information technology and proper information management. Nursing informatics can be applied by integrating technology to improve the efficiency of patient care in the healthcare delivery industry. Our assignment writing help is at affordable prices to students of all academic levels and disciplines.

Project Proposal

The proposed project will be known as the patient alert follow-up system (PAFS). PAFS will provide alerts to nurses involved in patient care to obtain information regarding patient follow-up for patients with a previous diagnosis of lifestyle conditions such as hypertension, obesity, or type 2 diabetes mellitus. After a visit to a healthcare facility, the patient will be examined by the nurse on duty. The patient will then undergo routine screening for lifestyle conditions such as hypertension and diabetes. If the nurse diagnoses the patient with one or multiple chronic lifestyle conditions, the attending nurse will insert their information into PAFS. The nurse can then search to retrieve the patient’s records.

If the nurse fails to retrieve patient details, this will indicate that this is the patient’s first visit or they had previously been diagnosed with these conditions. The nurses will then enter the screening results and refer the patient to an attending physician for further evaluation and booking of a clinical appointment. The attending physician will be alerted of the screening results during patient examination. The physician will then recommend a treatment plan for the patient, such as a diabetes clinic or physiotherapy session; PAFS will automatically select an appointment date depending on the availability of attending physicians and the urgency of the patient’s needs. For subsequent patients who have a previous diagnosis of diabetes, hypertension, or obesity, the nurse will obtain alerts of previous patient visits on whether the patient is adhering to the treatment plans and the outcomes of the current treatment plan. PAFS is a critical patient alert system since many patients with chronic conditions have poor prognoses due to a lack of patient follow-up or nonadherence due to recommended treatment (Kleinsinger, 2018). With the help of the PAFS system, nurses and physicians can evaluate the success of the treatment plan since every clinical visit will be recorded in the system. Healthcare professionals will have real-time and updated patient information.

Stakeholders Impacted by the Project

The patient alert follow-up system (PAFS) will impact stakeholders such as patients, nurses, physicians, physiotherapists, nurse informaticists, and the IT department. Patients will be the primary beneficiaries of this system. The primary goal of this system is to identify healthcare trends and lifestyle conditions, track treatment outcomes, and plan for therapy sessions. Most patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity do not get the necessary follow-ups, resulting in poor prognosis and healthcare outcomes (Byrne et al., 2021). This has resulted in complications such as kidney failure, heart failure, stroke, limb amputations, and heart attacks. This system will help in the effective monitoring of patients to ensure the quality and safety of patient care. Consequently, this will reduce the length of hospitalization and healthcare costs associated with managing complications of chronic conditions.

Nurses, physicians, and therapists will also be impacted by this system since they are the system’s end-users. They will have to adjust their operations to accommodate this system in their day-to-day practice. They will require training skills and be computer literate to be able to use this system. Nurse informaticists are critical in implementing any new technologies in a healthcare organization. Nurse informaticists work at the intersection of the nursing profession and technologies. Nursing informatics is a nursing specialty t