NURS 6051 Assignment: The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies

In the Discussion for this module, you considered the interaction of nurse informaticists with other specialists to ensure successful care. How is that success determined?

Patient outcomes and the fulfillment of care goals is one of the major ways that healthcare success is measured. Measuring patient outcomes results in the generation of data that can be used to improve results. Nursing informatics can have a significant part in this process and can help to improve outcomes by improving processes, identifying at-risk patients, and enhancing efficiency.

To Prepare:

Review the concepts of technology application as presented in the Resources.
Reflect on how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may help fortify nursing informatics as a specialty by leading to increased impact on patient outcomes or patient care efficiencies.

The Assignment: (4-5 pages not including the title and reference page)

In a 4- to 5-page project proposal written to the leadership of your healthcare organization, propose a nursing informatics project for your organization that you advocate to improve patient outcomes or patient-care efficiency. Your project proposal should include the following:

Describe the project you propose.
Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.
Explain the patient outcome(s) or patient-care efficiencies this project is aimed at improving and explain how this improvement would occur. Be specific and provide examples.
Identify the technologies required to implement this project and explain why.
Identify the project team (by roles) and explain how you would incorporate the nurse informaticist in the project team.
Use APA format and include a title page and reference page.
Use the Safe Assign Drafts to check your match percentage before submitting your work.

By Day 7 of Week 4

Submit your completed Project Proposal.

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

Health care is one of the many sectors that have registered massive advancements in technology use and integration into practice. Given the numerous challenges, the sector must contend with, establishing quick and lasting solutions is imperative. Nursing informatics plays a significant role in improving patient outcomes and care efficiencies. When discussing nursing informatics, the discussion is often about technology. The definition by Saheb and Saheb (2019) includes a field of nursing that incorporates nursing science, technology and informational sciences to develop, process, and manage data.

The significance of information in health care is unparalleled, primarily because it enables nurses to observe patients’ safety, access patients’ history and obtain a patient’s complete clinical picture (Saheb & Saheb, 2019). Among the technologies of crucial significance in nursing, informatics include electronic health (EHR) records and artificial intelligence (AI). This paper aims to describe a nursing informatics project, identify stakeholders affected and explain how the project impacts patient outcomes. Further, technologies leveraged and the roles of each of the project team members are highlighted.

Description of the Project

Due to identified gaps in patient care, particularly patient’s safety, this paper proposes a project proposal that incorporates both EHR and AI to solve the problem. The healthcare facility chosen specializes in critical care, especially trauma cases and advanced cardiovascular life support. These patients require close monitoring and care to avoid deterioration of their health status. The project involves the use of an EHR at the casualty department to enter details of critically ill patients. Special computer software then filters the information and performs computer-directed triaging. The system then automatically communicates to the emergency ward.

The emergency room nurses receive the communication via mobile phones and act quickly. The project aims at eliminating delays during triaging, and the death of acutely or severely ill patients. In reference to Stone (2019), due to poor triaging techniques, acutely injured patients die while doctors attend to those with minor injuries. This realization drives the need for a better triaging technique, as proposed in this project.

The project also incorporates the use of artificial intelligence. This part involves the use of a smart algorithm embedded within an EHR. Data is entered into the algorithm, which produces a scoring system based on how ill the patient is. The system determines acutely ill patients that require urgent care, and identifies patients with significant improvement, as well as those who need to be transferred to other wards for special care. When the scoring system indicates patient deterioration, nurses receive alerts via their mobile phones.

Numerous researchers have previously assessed the efficacy of similar technologies with promising results. For example, the Rothman index, which is a scoring system, has been used to identify patients at risk and with urgent need of care (Robert, 2019). This project, therefore, borrows largely from past tested evidence-based literature concerning the use of artificial intelligence in health care to improve patient’s outcomes in emergency departments.

Stakeholders

Various individuals or organizations can be actively involved or have an interest in a project. Further, the project implementation process can have both negative and positive effects on patients and nurses, hence the need for close monitoring. In this project, the first stakeholders are the medical leaders. From the topmost rank is the health care facility administrator, who is responsible for the daily operations within the hospital and coordinates the functions of all the departments, including the emergency unit. The administrator must be aware of any project happening within the facility. This project will impact him, however, indirectly through improved efficiency in patient management and better patient outcomes.

The financial department is the other stakeholder directly involved. Usually, the project must be affordable and able to generate profits. Affordability is one of the criteria for assessing financial feasibility of a project. The healthcare team (clinicians and nurses) are directly involved in the project. If the project’s implementation succeeds, information retrieval becomes easy, therefore exonerating the care team from the burden of paper-based records. Finally, patients are vital stakeholders in the project. The project itself aims at improving patient’s outcomes. Therefore, patients are directly impacted.

Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies

The project aims at producing significant results on patient outcomes. First, it aims to improve patient safety. Safety, in this case, refers to reduced medical errors, improved diagnostics, and triaging techniques. The computer-based triaging, which forms part of the proposed project, improves the triaging procedures. The system filters patients’ data and determines the severity of their condition. The emergency department then receives prompt notification for quick and efficient response. This will result in reduced mortality rates of acutely ill patients in the triaging room.

A previous research by Levin et al. (2018) found that computerized triaging reduces crowding in the triaging room. Further, Stone (2019) showed that the normal triaging technique is likely to be biased since clinicians can respond to patients with minor injuries at the expense of acutely injured patients. The proposed computerized triaging solves this biasness, thereby increasing the survival chances of critically ill patients.

Patient satisfaction also forms a component of patient safety in this project. The majority would ask how the proposed project improves patient satisfaction. The smart algorithm embedded into the computer scores patients in terms of the severity of their illnesses. Patients who score lower have a greater risk of adverse events and thus require immediate nurses’ intervention. The scoring reflects how sick a patient by monitoring the rate of deterioration.

As the patient status deteriorates, the scoring drops. This is a cause for alarm that calls for a fast response. A study by Choudhury and Asan (2020) showed that such scoring systems in the emergency department, for example, the Rothman index, improves patients’ clinical status as clinicians can respond quickly to acute cases. The improvement in patient’s clinical status is a determinant of their satisfaction.

Ability to reduce medical errors is also an improved aspect of patient care that the project aims to achieve. The project, as aforementioned, incorporates aspects of EHR and AI. An EHR does not only record patients’ information but also checks errors in the details entered. For example, the EHR can identify a potential patient allergy and alerts the clinician in the emergency department. The EHR therefore helps mitigate risks that are otherwise associated with paper-based setting (Saheb & Saheb, 2019). This results in minimized medical errors and improved drug administration safety.

Technologies required for the Project’s Execution

For a successful implementation of the project, a digital EHR and an AI tool are required. Even though few hospitals incorporate AI within their system, it is an essential technology for the success of this project. As defined by Robert (2019), AI refers to a computer capable of performing tasks with the same level of intelligence as human beings. Computer algorithms form the basic unit of an artificial AI (Robert, 2019).

In this case, an algorithm with a scoring index system is leveraged. It is used to determine patients’ severity of illness in the emergency room, determine the urgent need for care, and prioritize the needs of such patients. The rationale for the use of artificial intelligence in the project draws from its ability to perform fast and non-biased tasks such as triaging. Further, the AI provides accurate diagnosis and establishes an appropriate treatment plan. Other than the AI, a digital EHR is a requirement. The use of an EHR is based on the need to provide accurate diagnoses and reduce medical errors.

The Project Team and the Role of the Nurse Informaticist

The project is under the project manager’s leadership, who oversees the project’s implementation from the start to the finish. The manager monitors the progress of the project throughout the implementation process. In this case, the project manager organizes his team, delegates duties, and is answerable to the administration in case of any challenges. Another crucial team member is the strategic analyst. The strategic analyst sets strategic goals and objectives that the program aims to achieve both in the short- and long term.

In this case, the goals of the healthcare setting are to improve patients’ outcomes, particularly safety, satisfaction and to mitigate medical errors. The strategic analyst also analyzes the feasibility of the project. The care team, comprised of nurses and clinicians, also form an essential part of the project team. They assist in implementing the EHR and AI intelligence technology through active patient information management.

Finally, a nurse informaticist’s role as part of the project team includes working with computers and patient data. The nurse informaticist helps the hospital select appropriate technology and is responsible for training other staff members on how to use the technologies (Peltonen et al., 2019). As a result, the nurse informaticist acts as a crucial link between the care staff and the technologies leveraged.

References

Choudhury, A., & Asan, O. (2020). Role of artificial intelligence in patient safety outcomes: systematic literature review. JMIR medical informatics 8 (7), e18599, https://doi.org/10.2196/18599.

Levin, S., Toerper, M., Hamrock, E., Hinson, J. S., Barnes, S., Gardner, H., Dugas, A., Linton, B., Kirsch, T. & Kelen, G. (2018). Machine-Learning-Based Electronic Triage More Accurately Differentiates Patients With Respect to Clinical Outcomes Compared With the Emergency Severity Index. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 71(5), 565–574. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2017.08.005.

Peltonen, L. M., Pruinelli, L., Ronguillo, C., Nibber, R., Peresmitre, E. L., Block, L., Deforest, H., Lewis, A., Alhuwail, D., Ali, S., Badger, M. K., Eler, G. J., Georgsson, M., Islam, T., Jeon, E., Jung, H., Kuo, C. H., Sarmiento, R.F., Sommer, J. A., Tayaben, J. & Topaz, M. (2019). The current state of Nursing Informatics-An international cross-sectional survey. Finish journal of eHealth and eWelfare, 11(3), 220–231. https://doi.org/10.23996/fjhw.77584.

Robert, N. (2019). How artificial intelligence is changing nursing. Nursing Management, 50(9), 30–39. doi: 10.1097/01.NUMA.0000578988.56622.21

Saheb, T., & Saheb, M. (2019). Analyzing and visualizing knowledge structures of health informatics from 1974 to 2018: a bibliometric and social network analysis. Healthcare Informatics Research, 25(2), 61-72. https://doi.org/10.4258/hir.2019.25.2.61

Stone, E. L. (2019). Clinical Decision Support Systems in the Emergency Department: Opportunities to Improve Triage Accuracy. Journal of Emergency Nursing, 45(2), 220–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jen.2018.12.016.

NURS 6051 Assignment: The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies