Nurses are critical to healthcare delivery, but a new survey indicates nurses with informatics capabilities and intelligence can boost care quality and bring value to the use of clinical system and technology at their organizations.
Here are seven key findings from the 2015 HIMSS Impact of the Informatics Nurse Survey. The survey gathered responses online from 576 respondents from the HIMSS enterprise database with a job title of "director" or higher, informatics nurse or clinician between Nov. 17, 2014 and Jan. 24, 2015.
1. While 98 percent of respondents said their organizations employ informatics professionals, responses indicate a large variation in time frame in terms of when healthcare organizations first created an informatics position: 12 percent said their first informatics position was created before 1995 and 18 percent said it was until between 2010 and 2014. The majority (23 percent) indicated they established the position between 2005 and 2009.
2. Most organizations only hire one informatics leader (40 percent). Eighteen percent of respondents said they hired two informatics leaders, and 4 percent said they hired three.
3. Nurses with informatics backgrounds are seen as positively affecting care quality, as 60 percent of respondents said informatics nurses have a "very high level of impact" on the quality of care patients receive.
4. Respondents also overwhelmingly indicated informatics nurses bring a high degree of value to participating in the implementation and optimization of clinical systems, at 85 percent and 83 percent, respectively. Additionally, 73 percent of respondents said informatics nurses bring value to their organization through the design of clinical systems.
5. Eight out of 10 respondents reported having an informatics nurse involved in the analysis, design, implementation, optimization and selection of clinical systems has "high value" on workflow. Seventy-six percent said the same about patient safety, 70 percent said the same about compliance with policies and regulations and 67 percent said the same about the accuracy of documentation.
6. Just over half of respondents, 51 percent, reported having an informatics nurse involved in the analysis, design, implementation, optimization and selection of clinical systems has a high degree of impact on achieving integration and being ability to interface with other systems.
7. Seventy percent of survey respondents said informatics nurses play a role in integrating medical devices at their organization. Thirty-eight percent said they play a role in personalized healthcare, 33 percent said they play a role in remote monitoring and 29 percent said they play a role in data warehousing.
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