Using Health Information Technology as a Source of Evidence-Based Practice - Research Paper Example

Using Health Information Technology as a Source of Evidence-Based Practice Healthcare IT can be utilized for meetinga variety of challenges in nursing. One challenge that it can help alleviate is the shortage of the nursing workforce, especially by aiding the current nursing workforce to reduce medical errors, improve efficiency, improve monitoring, tracking of patient information, improving data collection’s accuracy and efficiency, as well as enhancing administrative task efficiency (Clark 22).

Healthcare IT can also be used to establish a countrywide surveillance capability, which would enable the current nursing workforce to deal with emergencies in the occurrence of an outbreak of a pandemic infectious disease. Among the various health care IT resources that can be applied in the process of alleviating the effects of the nursing workforce shortages are; tele-health, clinical decision support systems, care planning tools, data capture, decision support system, computerized provider order entry, bar code medication administration, and electronic health records (Clark 22).

This paper seeks to explore the last three resources as evidence based resources to help address shortages in the nursing workforce. The electronic health record acts as an official record for persons shared by multiple agencies and institutions. Health information systems that are digitized should improve care quality, efficiency, and ultimately reduce the effects of shortages. The EHR includes family history, allergies, contact information, insurance information, and hospitalization records, among others.

Its benefits include efficient retrieval of information, automatic sharing and updating of information where different organizations and offices are concerned, as well as lower effort redundancy (Clark 56). These benefits, as well as others, aid health institutions in reducing reduce the time needed, by nurses, in retrieving information manually, and thus, reducing their workload. Another healthcare IT resource that helps to combat this shortage is patient monitoring technology. As the current nursing workforce continues its transition to proactive models of delivery of healthcare, remote monitored solutions are expected to gain more ground.

Information that nurses are provided with include health intelligence, international health research, market analysis, news and commentaries, and strategic insights (Clark 67). These are especially useful since the strained workforce that work for 12 hours has limited time to attain this information themselves. Patient monitoring services offer knowledge on ongoing research in various market segments, provide analysis on the fastest growing, largest, and declining markets so as to better understand challenges and trends, as well as discover alternative means of dealing with these challenges, and building models to forecast patient needs from data sources.

The patient monitoring service offers coverage in cardiac monitoring, blood pressure monitoring, temperature monitoring, sleep apnea monitoring, patient monitoring IT, pulse oximetry, glucose monitoring, multi-parameter monitoring, and external defibrillators (Clark 68). Finally, because of a staffing shortage, as well as expectations on the available staff today, human errors have begun to surface in the administration of medication. Various articles have discussed the incidences and the amount of resources that are used to cover them when they do occur.

Barcode medication administration has helped the stretched nurse workforce to reduce required labor in medication. It aids the staff to access medical results, as well as other information, faster in order to support improved decision making and efficiency (Clark 77). It provides the patient with increased safety, especially with a stretched workforce, as well as for the healthcare staff. For positive implementation, the fundamental group needs to test thoroughly for as long as possible to discover errors, barriers, and workarounds.

However, in the best systems, there will be the occurrence of errors. What the system aids the healthcare staff in doing is reducing medication errors by a drastic margin before the medication gets to the patient, thus reducing their workload (Clark 79).Work CitedClark, Carolyn. Creative nursing leadership & management. Sudbury : Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2012. Print.