Health Care Informatics

Hello to all-

As I sit here and think about what I want to write about let me tell you all first that this is the FIRST blog that I have ever wrote. I didn’t know anything about getting one started or that I could even do this myself. But I did and I can!!!

So here it goes……

As I have done the different assignments for my health care informatics class, I have learned a lot of things this week. First, that I WOULD HAVE TO set up a Twitter account and maintain it. I must admit that that was kind of depressing to me, I do not care to have a Twitter account, or use anything besides Facebook. Although I must admit that now that I have made my account and am getting accustomed to the way Twitter is set up, I am enjoying some of the articles that other people are posting. Interesting little tidbits about different nursing fields and events that happen. Twitter up and running so check me out at @knwanurse. I definitely can not promise that I will ever post anything interesting, but who knows it might be some information that you did not know before. The second thing I have learned it how to set up a blog and to keep it up and blog things. I always had this misconception that blogs were kept by people in business suits trying to promote their business. Of course the movie Julie and Julia proved me wrong, and I have decided that Julie really got into blogging, probably much more than you will see out of me. Now I know that people like me can set up a blog and post just about anything they want. I am still kind of dumbfounded about the idea that I am actually blogging.  Finally, I have learned that their are many many many ways to learn new things and many ways to find out all sorts of information. Holy cow, I never knew there was so much information about anything you could ever want to know about out here on this thing they call the World Wide Web. Having a twitter account proves that, everybody is posting new ideas and evidence based information on this or that. How do people have time to keep up with all this information? I barely have time to keep up with my Facebook account. Well I definitely have learned some things in this first week, wonder what I will learn in the next 4 weeks.  That is scary to think about, but I am definitely up to the challenge because it will help me in my career as a nurse and to help my patients in my care for them.

Health Care Informatics? What is it really?

Our Nursing Informatics book says that it is “the combination of health care science, information science, and computer science” (McGongile, D. & Mastrain, K. 2009). Also Georgia State defines it as, “Health Informatics combines knowledge from medical areas, healthcare administration, and information technology. Experts in Health Informatics can, in other words, help the industry effectively adopt information technology to innovate and improve its medical services and the way they are administrated” (Georgia State University, 2009). By knowing how to find, interpret, and comprehend the information in nursing/science is important because it enables you to perform for your patients to the best of your abilities.  All of these new systems to help us in caring for our patients are interesting and some are very rewarding in raising the bar of health care. Like the new electronic health record (EHR) that the hospital where I work has incorporated for our hospital to use. Different people enter the information they acquire so that we all can see how the patient is doing. For example, a nurse assistant takes a patients vitals and enters them into the system. In turn, I can see them as well as the physician, physical therapist, and any other health care team member taking care of the patient. This helps us in making sure that the patient is getting better in their particular diagnosis or if they are getting worse and what we need to do to help turn them around for a full recovery. The health care system is forever evolving and it is moving in the direction of including technology with it. Where will it be in twenty years? thirty? I hope that I am still alive to see what is in store for the health care world.

Georgia State University. (2009). Health Informatics. http://www2.cis.gsu.edu/cis/HealthInfo/

McGongile, D. & Mastrain, K. (2009). Nursing Informatics and the Foundation of Knowledge. Jones and Bartlett; Sudbury, MA.

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