Nursing Informatics Tools

Though not very new, nursing informatics is growing at a very first rate due to the new developments in technology each and ever day. The advances in technology is radically altering approaches used by nurses diagnosing, treating, caring for and managing patients. Cleveland Clinic Nursing Institute (2010) consequently defines nursing informatics as an area of expertise integrating nursing science, information science and computer science in managing data, information and knowledge in practice of nursing. For this reason, the field of nursing informatics is concerned with the resources, devices, and techniques needed to optimize, acquirement, storage, retrieval, and use of information in nursing. Tools for nursing informatics are not only limited to computers. Nonetheless they encompass formal nursing terminologies, communication and information systems and nursing guidelines.

Currently there are many trends in healthcare that make use of nursing informatics tools. One of such is collaborative computing that makes use of internet to carry out research online. This has in turn encouraged productivity in the field as very many individuals all over the globe are allowed to share information and ideas instantaneously (Clinic Nursing Institute, 2010). This could also be accomplished on community of practice, telenursing networks, E-health networks, and virtual social networks. There are also a number of electronic devices, some hand held, that are used to collect the needed data, store the information and also some are used for data analysis. Very many decisions in health care support system now rely on tools for nursing informatics.

Turley (1996) asserts that to allow accurate and standard exchange of data/information content between providers and system, there is use of medical vocabularies that are controlled. There are also other standards like the ISO used to regulate the nursing practice.