Healthcare Technology and Nursing Leadership

Emerging Technology and Nursing Practice

As technological advancement is booming in all sectors of healthcare, the field of nursing is no exception. Nurses of the 21st century need to have the ability to use technology in a way that facilitates mobility as well as relationships, interactions and operational processes. In addition to these, Nurse Leaders need to be experts at information management, including knowledge acquisition and distribution. Health care needs nurses who can analyze technologies from both the bedside and IT perspectives and that is why Nursing informatics is so important nowadays.Here is a glimpse of how technology is changing the way nurses care for their patients.

Looking back…

 It all started in 2009 when it was determined that the national mandates and guidelines for the development and adoption of health IT were not enough to accelerate technological advancement which was needed in healthcare  and therefore  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act(ARRA) was enacted to address this issue(Nelson &Staggers,2015). With this act, came the  Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act , a critical component which is now responsible for authorizing programs that  improve healthcare quality, safety and efficiency using health IT( Nelson & staggers, 2015; DesRoches, Worzala & Bates, 2013). The provisions of this act were intended to stimulate adoption of electronic health records and development of secure healthcare information exchange.

Today

Healthcare institutions and healthcare providers are  under pressure to implement EHR in order to comply with CMS’s Medicare incentive payments. The implementation of EHR involves disbursement of large amounts of money and other capital purchases that support the system and healthcare institutions and providers are required to comply with meaningful use standards . Therefore the is a remarkable increase in the utilization of CLOUD

The Impact of Mobile Technology in Healthcare

The Challenge for Nurse Leaders

Nurse leaders are challenged to lead the way in this changing landscape in healthcare, they are actively involved in care coordination.They are using databases to extract actionable knowledge and use it in strategic planning, workflow improvement, quality improvement,safety improvement and patient outcomes improvement.In addition to the this Nurses play an important role in patient care, patient education and documentation. Emphasis is currently being placed on effective discharge teaching as a way to prevent penalties from readmissions.Our discharge instructions give a detailed explanation on how patients can access their electronic medical record from home and we are required to explain this to the patients on discharge. Physicians are slowly moving away from the medicine model of care to holistic model in which they ensure that patient is being treated as a whole person and not just for his or her presenting complaint (Gelinas, 2015). 

References

Gelinas, L. (2015). Meaningful use is a workforce issue. American Nurse Today, 10(9), 6-6 1p.
Nelson,R & Staggers,N (2015).Health informatics; An interprofessional approach. Louis,,MO: Elsevier
DesRoches, C. M., Worzala, C., & Bates, S. (2013). Some hospitals are falling behind in meeting 'meaningful use' criteria and could be vulnerable to penalties in 2015. Health Affairs, 32(8), 1355-60. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.roberts.edu/docview/1428492276?accountid=13562Westra, B., Subramanian, A., Hart, C., Matney, S., Wilson, P., Huff, S., & ... Delaney, C. (2010). Achieving 'meaningful use' of electronic health records through the integration of the Nursing Management Minimum Data Set. Journal Of Nursing Administration, 40(7/8), 336-343 8p. doi:10.1097/NNA.0b013e3181e93994