The Future of Nursing Informatics: Trends and Predictions for the Next Decade
Nursing informatics combines nursing science, analytics, and information science to help manage and share vital healthcare data. Its main objective is to promptly provide clinicians with accurate patient data to enhance patient-centered care and results.
Nursing informatics streamlines the documentation process. Paperwork is reduced with the use of electronic health records (EHRs), which help in the automation of data transmission that nurses, doctors, and patients can easily access. Nursing informatics enhances patient care decisions and outcomes. It plays a vital role in leveraging data and technology to improve healthcare.
Such a domain requires specialists known as nursing informaticists with clinical experience, technical skills, project management skills, analytical skills, and leadership skills.
Nursing informatics is gaining prominence in the specialized healthcare field. Thirty-nine percent of informaticists have over a decade of experience and 76% express high career satisfaction. They excel in digital health applications, including systems integration (31%), mobile technology (28%), and medical device integration (24%).
Emerging Technologies in Nursing Informatics and Their Future Implications
Let’s look at the emerging digital technologies in the nursing domain with their benefits, challenges, and future implications:
1. AI / Big Data
Benefits: Employing decision support systems can enhance the detection of infections in pandemics/outbreaks by utilizing AI and big data analytics for contact tracing and population health response.
Challenges: The bias of datasets is currently being embedded into AI algorithms, causing a drop in nursing participation in their development.
Future Implications: Extensive research must be done for acute and primary care when dealing with AI in the nursing domain. Policymakers should be accountable. Educational and leadership skills are essential in AI and data analytics.
2. Assisted Living / Smart Home Technologies
Benefits: Motion sensing and monitoring systems can help tailor care choices for elderly individuals in their households who are suffering from memory issues.
Challenges: Identifying appropriate devices is difficult due to the diversity and rotation of technologies, which leads to privacy concerns as well as technical and cost obstacles.
Future Implications: Nurses should actively participate in designing, developing, and implementing systems in collaboration with patients and caregivers.
3. Clinical Decision Support Systems
Benefits: These systems have the aptitude to recognize contagious illnesses and initiate proper care responses.
Challenges: Excessive notifications for medical professionals can lead to alert fatigue and the need for alternate solutions due to insufficient research on their impact and effectiveness in certain clinical settings, such as emergency departments.
Future Implications: Incorporate nurses in designing, developing, and implementing systems that enhance decision-making and workflow without causing disruptions by taking usability into account.
4. EHRs
Benefits: Surpass paper documentation in terms of data completeness, structure, and legibility.
Challenges: Any shortcomings in the quantity or quality of the documented data are due to time constraints or a lack of proper system design
Future Implications: Nursing leadership must refurbish EHRs to lessen the burdens of documentation.
5. Mobile Health
Benefits: Guiding patients through apps can enhance immediate results. Moreover, with mobile health, patients and providers can keep in touch and regularly update.
Challenges: There are worries regarding the cost and dependability of mobile apps for clinical guidance and nurses’ apprehensions about their professional image when using apps, especially in hospitals.
Future Implications: Guidelines and a professional work culture supporting the usage of mobile devices in clinical practices need to be developed and incorporated with EHRs and other correlated technologies when required.
6. Telehealth / Telemedicine
Benefits: Time-saving aids in the optimization of all healthcare services while raising the efficiency of healthcare delivery.
Challenges: More adequate technical abilities are needed, and nurses’ pessimistic views about telemedicine and their suspicions about privacy and data security might delay its adoption.
Future Implications: Nurses and caretakers must assist patients in co-creating telehealth systems and new virtual care.
7. Personalized Precision Healthcare
Benefits: Creating treatment plans specific to each patient allows nurses to provide care that is customized to their unique needs.
Challenges: The speed of technological advancements and concerns about fair access to technology could hinder progress.
Future Implications: Nurses must push for equal access for patients and families to their heredity-based health data.
8. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
Benefits: VR training is effective for enhancing understanding in nursing education and can be utilized as a treatment tool or for clinical intervention in both pediatric and adult populations.
Challenges: Simulation sicknesses, such as lightheadedness and vision difficulties, might occur.
Future Implications: Nurses and educators should be active participants in the creation of inexpensive devices and software that are compatible with current mobile, internet, and digital technologies.
9. Blockchain Technology
Benefits: Promotes trust among healthcare professionals by decentralizing control and allowing global accessibility through cross-border transactions.
Challenges: Scalability proves difficult with a larger number of transactions, affecting efficiency. Proof-of-Work (PoW) chains use a large amount of energy to balance security and environmental concerns. Patient privacy in healthcare records is at risk on public blockchains due to compromised data privacy.
Future Implications: Enhancing cross-chain communication through interoperability will facilitate connections between different blockchains, such as networks enabling data interchange among medical facilities. Blockchain-based decentralized identity systems empower individuals to manage their data, such as self-sovereign identity, for digital interactions between patients and providers. Well-defined regulations encourage the adoption of innovative solutions, like tokenized frameworks for healthcare assets.
Importance of Specialists for Nursing Informatics
Informatics nurses (INs) and informatics nurse specialists (INSs) are crucial in utilizing technology, information, and communication to improve healthcare delivery across various human experiences because of their deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem. Let’s look at the ways they contribute:
1. Combination of Nursing and Informatics Practice Expertise
INs possess a distinct blend of nursing and informatics knowledge. They bridge the gap between clinical practice and information systems to maintain data integrity. They drive innovation in nursing through technology and communication, involving various project stakeholders.
2. Skilful Hold on Healthcare Delivery and Operational Flow
INs have a comprehensive grasp of clinical care delivery operations in nursing and other related areas and the effects of system change in healthcare. Their knowledge of applied clinical informatics aids in alleviating the challenges of existing and emerging healthcare technology trends. They are vital in analyzing, designing, and implementing user-friendly experiences for healthcare team members.
3. Competent Management of Data, Information and Knowledge
INs prioritize care and patient outcomes by using nursing theory in managing data. They stress the importance of data quality in analytics. Promoting awareness of workflow and practice ensures timely and relevant information for all intended purposes. Clinical nursing expertise complements advancements in data science, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), precision medicine, and other strategies.
4. Organizational Strategy Led by Informatics Leadership
INs work with clinicians, vendors, quality and safety partners, IT professionals, and other stakeholders to create and execute effective solutions for clinical issues. They collaborate with key stakeholders at the executive level and external leaders to drive strategy, policy, vendor choice, and executive support for informatics projects.
5. Impact on Healthcare Policies
INs support ethical standards and principles in policy creation. They advise lawmakers on technology, data, and communication laws affecting healthcare. They advocate for new policies and educate stakeholders on regulatory changes to improve healthcare strategy and compliance.
6. Education across the Healthcare Spectrum
INs help organizations transform into a Learning Health System by creating and executing educational programs and solutions to meet informatics competencies and user requirements.
Summing Up
Nurses at all levels and in various roles and settings must actively work towards promoting health equity. Policymakers, educators, healthcare leaders, and payers are critical in supporting these efforts. Advancing health equity through nursing requires new data sources, advanced informatics, and integrated systems that reflect the profession’s holistic perspective. Nurses trained in informatics and data science must develop user-friendly systems that address social needs and promote health equity. It is important to remain cautious of unintended consequences of technology on health equity.