response 2

Peer 1

Working in mental for majority of my nursing career, I have seen a large gap between inpatient treatment and outpatient treatment.  Patients lack the collaboration of care between these settings.  Often, information is overlooked or entirely missed.  Although, electronic medical records (EMR’s) are utilized in most healthcare settings, information from different EMR’s is not always accessible.  The EMR from outpatient and inpatient services should be accessible to healthcare providers in any healthcare system to ensure continuity of care.  By having full access healthcare costs could decrease, patient satisfaction and medication compliant would increase, and reduce hospitalizations.

            Data that would be accessed through the EMR would include: Physician reports, medication record, nurse notes, case management notes or records, physician discharge notes and physician progress notes.  According to Schwartz et al. (2016), continuity of care can improve quality of life, better community function, reduced costs, reduce severity of symptoms and increase satisfaction.  Focusing on the inpatient setting, information obtained would be utilized by nursing staff. 

            McGonigle and Mastrian (2021) defines nursing informatics as a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information and knowledge into nursing practice.  Nurses would use clinical judgment and reasoning by reviewing the patients EMR.  We would know when patients are due for long-acting injection, know when they last saw their providers and know their plan of care.  Patients would not miss doses, therefore reducing the possibility of requiring hospitalization and potential decomposition of the patient mental status.  Marifino et al., (2020) also explain how EMR’s allow us to complete a risk analysis for readmission.  Meaning, outpatient providers would be able to be more proactive in preventing hospitalizations, rather than in the inpatient providers needing to be reactive.

Peer 2

The modern professional world’s primary functions are highly dependent on technology, mainly the collection and utilization of informatics and data. Likewise, the healthcare industry often uses informatics and data collection to manage elements incorporated in its functionality, including ensuring sufficient staff to cater to clients, high-quality patient care, and facilitating effective management. Notably, the nursing discipline encompasses different scenarios in that data can be utilized to solve existing problems; a brilliant example is when dealing with the nursing shortage. Therefore, it is vital to understand how data can be collected, assessed, and used in managing nursing staff shortages in a specified healthcare facility.

              Nursing informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge into nursing practice (McGonigle and Mastrian, 2021). It is a subset of informatics, specific to the field and the role of the nurse in the healthcare setting (Sweeney, 2017). Also, healthcare informative is a combination of healthcare sciences, computer science, information and cognitive science that assist in the management of healthcare information (Sweeney, 2017).

                Technological informatics used in obtaining nursing data in any medical center is essential in providing information that improves clinical practices. For instance, when dealing with nursing shortages, data about the nurse-to-patient ratios can be used to measure and analyze whether the current ratios abide by the required standards or if there is a potential shortage. According to McHugh et al. (2021), the United States displays varying nurse-to-patient ratios depending on states and the care service provided; however, the required ratio when caring for an intensive care patient is 1:2 or less, and 1:4 or less for emergency patients. Consequently, the data can be collected by an algorithm that calculates the hours used by the existing staff and the number of patients catered to within said hours in a given period, such as three months; the information will be accessed through the nursing informatics platform that records said algorithm. Thus, the gathered data will offer knowledge concerning the number of hours the nursing staff works and the number of patients catered to within said time frame. It is a challenge that subsequently results in the few available nurses’ overworking, leading to fatigue, which results in patients’ care being ineffectively administered (Weaver et al., 2018).

Apa

2 references