Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample

Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample

Advances in technology and biomedicine knowledge discovery have broadened the concept of patient empowerment, where patients get both tools and resources to play an active role in health care services delivery. Since the publication of the original Institute of Medicine (IOM), healthcare organizations have accelerated the development and adoption of healthcare information technology (HIT), resulting in a positive impact of HIT on patient safety. According to Alotaibi & Federico (2017), patient safety refers to avoiding, preventing, and ameliorating injuries or adverse outcomes from healthcare processes. One of these trends in healthcare technology of the 21st century is healthcare informatics, defined as the intersection of healthcare, computer science, and information science. Through patient-centered care, varied resources, devices, and methods are optimized to acquire, store, retrieve, and utilize information in health and biomedicine—consequently, this essay targets to describe healthcare informatics as a healthcare trend that impacts patient safety.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Potential Challenges or Risks Inherent in Selected Health Informatics Tools

Health care informatics tools that significantly improve patient safety but are also laden with potential risks and challenges include patient data management systems (PDMS), automated medication dispensing cabinets (AMDC), and computerized physician’s orders (CPOE). Additional tools are clinical decision support (CDS), electronic medication administration record (eMAR), and bar code medication administration (BCMA). However, the limited scope of this essay necessitates that only two of the tools (CDS and CPOE) highlighted will be described in the context of the potential challenges and risks.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Clinical decision support is a system that seeks to improve medical decision-making around diagnosis or clinical predication rules, prevention and management of diseases through routine care reminders to clinicians or patients, and treatment sing electronic medication prescribing (Demiris & Kneale, 2015). Despite the many benefits of using CDS, one of its drawbacks is that, like EHRs, they mainly rely on external data, leading to deficiencies at times (Sutton et al., 2020). A typical example is that a CDS module may encourage ordering even when the healthcare facility lacks sufficient supplies. CDS users also risk developing workarounds that compromise data by entering incorrect or generic data, mainly in poorly designed CDS systems. The third and last of CDS challenges is that these systems encounter interoperability issues because most of them exist as stand-alone systems or exist in a system that cannot communicate with other systems.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Similarly, CPOE technology enables physicians to order drugs and tests and consultations, and other medical services or products electronically, thus avoiding the issuance of handwritten prescriptions. Wears (2016) posits that while it has been heralded as the Holy Grail for patient safety, CPOE presents the challenge of poor usability where a computer-user interface may contain embedded traps causing users to make mistakes. The human mind by nature is exquisitely tailored to make sense of its environment, given the slightest clue. However, poorly designed artifacts compromise this mental faculty by offering few or, worse, misleading indications, thus translating old problems into new ones. As such, while eliminating the problem of illegible handwriting, they introduce the problem of picking the wrong item in a drop-down list leading to prescribing the wrong medication. Other pick list errors could result in the wrong dose, route of administration, selecting the wrong diagnostic test, or prescribing to the wrong patient. Be that as it may, the organization in context can employ mechanisms to identify the most common pick list errors and resolve them.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Most Promising Healthcare Technology Trends- BCMA and PDMS and the Promise Each Holds

According to Mulac et al. (2021), proper use of BCMA can prevent medication errors and promote patient safety. Nurses can confirm the five rights of medication administration: the right patient, proper medication, right dose, right route, and right time by scanning the bar code on the medication and the patient identification wristband. Suffice it to say that BCMA raises the bar of patient safety as medication administration reduces medication errors. While at the patient’s bedside, the nursing professional retrieves the product and scans its barcode with the patient identification bracelet. Every medication is scanned with the system telling the nurse everything is right or triggers a warning if something is wrong.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Moreover, in this closed-loop system, the medication order is electronically tracked across all the steps of the medication process. There exist enough checks and balances during the ordering, dispensing, and administration of the medications. The bedside happens to be the tail end of medication administration and thus comprises a critical place to prevent medical errors from occurring. With the automated scanning process offered by BCMA, the result is a significant improvement on the patient, better patient outcomes due to appropriate treatment, and improved patient satisfaction.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

The author’s considered opinion is that the introduction of patient data management system, like BCMA, has excellent potential in the future as it improves patient outcomes and financial situation in a hospital (Lemma et al., 2020). The cited researchers’ further note that PDMS facilitate clinical documentation at the patient’s bedside and have demonstrated their efficacy on completeness of patient charting and the time taken to document. It is essential to acknowledge that more studies need to be conducted on the economic validation of PDMS in hospitals. Most importantly, existing literature indicates that a combination of interventions focusing on technical and behavioral factors does improve the quality of patient data and its use.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Conclusion

This essay has determined that healthcare technology trends in the 21st century are many, with health informatics tools comprising a significant component. They include CDS, CPOE, BCMA, and PDMS, amongst others. Each HIT trend has its benefits and a fair share of its drawbacks, hence the need for healthcare organization management to implement their preferred technology diligently. BCMA demonstrates the excellent potential to improve both patient safety and better patient outcomes through reduced medication errors. Likewise, PDMS has shown its promise in improving data management, although its initial cost of implementation is relatively high. Proper utilization of healthcare technology trends will enhance patient safety by reducing medication errors, lowering adverse drug reactions, and improving practice guidelines compliance.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Alotaibi, Y. K., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi medical journal, 38(12), 1173.  (Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5787626/

References

Demiris, G., & Kneale, L. (2015). Informatics systems and tools to facilitate patient-centered care coordination. Yearbook of medical informatics, 24(01), 15-21. (Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4587048/

Lemma, S., Janson, A., Persson, L. Å., Wickremasinghe, D., & Källestål, C. (2020). Improving quality and use of routine health information system data in low-and middle-income countries: A scoping review. PloS one, 15(10), e0239683.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample) URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0239683

Mulac, A., Mathiesen, L., Taxis, K., & Granås, A. G. (2021). Barcode medication administration technology used in hospital practice: a mixed-methods observational study of policy deviations. BMJ quality & safety. (Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)URL: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/early/2021/07/19/bmjqs-2021-013223

Sutton, R. T., Pincock, D., Baumgart, D. C., Sadowski, D. C., Fedorak, R. N., & Kroeker, K. I. (2020). An overview of clinical decision support systems: benefits, risks, and strategies for success. NPJ digital medicine, 3(1), 1-10.(Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample) URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-020-0221-y

Wears, R.L(2016), Unintended Consequences of CPOE  (Healthcare Information Technology Trends in Nursing Practice Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)URL: https://psnet.ahrq.gov/web-mm/unintended-consequences-cpoe