St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, where the quality of patient care intertwines with the provision of well-rounded services in various speciality areas, such as cancer care, orthopaedics and gastroenterology, stands a chance to harness the power of nursing informatics to step up the game in improving patient outcomes and care efficiencies. This project aims to develop a nursing informatics initiative to integrate more advanced information technologies to facilitate clinical decision-making, streamline patient care workflows, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
Project Description
The featured project, “Efficient Patient Care through Nursing Informatics at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital,” aims to incorporate an advanced nursing informatics system with the objective of improving patient care service delivery. The fundamental part of this initiative is the development and deployment of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system that is improved by clinical decision support (CDS) tools, patient health monitoring, and real-time data analytics that are incorporated into the system (Uslu & Stausberg, 2021). The system will ensure that nurses and other healthcare professionals get instant access to all the patient health details, which are comprehensive and evidence-based, as well as predictive analytics for risk identification and prevention.
Stakeholders Affected
Integrating nursing informatics in St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital has a positive effect on the quality of care and influences significant participants. In this case, patients are the priority, and they are provided with more personalized, timely, and quality treatment. Modern data analytics and electronic health records aid in personalizing patient therapies, which in turn results in better outcomes and satisfaction. The primary beneficiaries are nurses and the healthcare providers. Increasing the use of data-driven insights will allow these professionals to make informed decisions and provide more efficient care. This is expected to result in efficient use of resources and help reduce the cognitive burden of the clinical staff, thus allowing them to spend more time in direct patient care.
Hospital administration will also benefit from these endeavours. The administration will achieve enhanced care delivery efficiency, patient satisfaction, and likely lower hospital readmission rates, thus achieving cost effectiveness while maintaining a high standard of patient care. These improvements, in particular, enhance the hospital’s reputation for growth and patient care. The IT Department will take care of the installation and upgrade of the system’s informatics. Ensuring smooth integration of new technologies with the current systems, protecting patients’ data, and providing technical support for the clinical staff are critical functions of this department. Also, evidence-based or data-driven nursing informatics will be beneficial for hospital quality assurance teams. They could scrutinize the care results, find out what needs changing, and implement the latest healthcare standards and regulations using the data. This holistic approach aims at enhancing patient care and encouraging innovation and continuous process improvement at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital.
Enhancing Patient Results and Efficiency
The nursing informatics program of St Luke’s Episcopal Hospital will centre on safety, coordination, predictive care, and patient participation, transforming patient care. This reform is built on a highly developed EHR system with CDS features. These techniques are proven to be very effective in minimizing medication errors (Carini et al., 2021). It works by sending notifications to patients in all the care spaces of the hospital about drug interactions or allergic reactions occurring in real time. The team is not only focused on safety but also has a strong commitment to patient care coordination. All care team members can have the patient’s data recorded immediately in the EHR system, thus reducing the need to repeat the information that was already given. This information flow is seamless, and thus care silos are eliminated, leading to a situation where every specialist is aware of the data and evidence of the latest patient state.
Similarly, such an attempt is supported by predictive analytics. The system will do it through the analysis of big data of high-risk patients with readmission or other problems so that timely intervention can be implemented. Quality patient outcomes and a systematic shift toward maintaining health in the population will decrease hospital pressure on resources and give better care effectiveness. Two ways of fostering this partnership are allowing patients to be active members of their care team and empowering them with knowledge for decision-making. A patient portal will be built to have a site for patients to access their health data and monitor their ailments. This gives the patients confidence that their input will guide recovery plans which are tailored to the individual, specifically in orthopaedic cases.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital can take patient care to the next level by employing nursing informatics that will make it more secure, coordinated and focused on the patient. This engagement will benefit the patients and professionals by introducing technology in treatment.
Required Technology
The nursing informatics project at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital demands the use of the latest technology in order to enhance patient outcomes and healthcare effectiveness. The underlying core of this technology is an enhanced Electronic Health Records (EHR) system that includes the Clinical Decision Support (CDS) functions. It does not cause any difficulties to hospital infrastructures as it seamlessly integrates with the infrastructure to facilitate a smooth process and interoperability. The use of mobile health monitoring devices complements EHR by providing real-time health monitoring. Such devices monitor patient vital signs and health conditions, and the data is transmitted to the EHR system, giving healthcare providers the opportunity to provide proactive patient care. The use of a powerful data analytics platform will help realize the maximum from the great set of data generated. This platform will be able to parse and digest massive amounts of information and give predictive insights for clinical decision-making and risk identification, therefore allowing early detection and immediate intervention. Furthermore, patients should have access to the portal to check their online health records. This portal enables individuals to become informed and to communicate with healthcare practitioners. This encourages the engagement of the population and leads to a rise in the awareness of the community(Jouparinejad et al., 2020). These tools lay the groundwork that we have been using in our nursing informatics program to bring the care at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital to the 21st-century level.
Project Team and Nurse Informaticist Incorporation
The St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital nursing informatics project team needs to be diverse in terms of skills and ideas in order to succeed. The Project Manager (PM) is responsible for ensuring the project execution, the milestones, and the team communication. Nurse Informaticists are the major players in the team undertaking a project design and implementation. In this context, they know nursing and informatics to develop a system design that meets the actual needs of clinical personnel, which makes them a very important part of the bridge that joins the needs of clinical personnel and IT solutions (Moore et al., 2020). Once the design system is in place, they train and support nursing personnel (including the nursing staff) to ensure the ultimate transfer and adoption of the new system. In addition, nurse informaticists do clinical data analysis that enhances patient care.
IT technicians set up, configure and connect the new informatics system with the hospital’s infrastructure. Their technical capabilities make the system very robust, secure, and smoothly interconnected. Thus, it is effective in creating a unified care platform for a patient. Implementation of the IT system needs the clinical staff, including nurses and doctors, who will use it. They become part of the solution, and therefore, it is continuously being updated and enhanced, which eventually results in their becoming user-friendly, efficient, and clinically useful. Quality Improvement Analysts are the key element of the analysis after the implementation, which includes evaluation of the result and the identification of the weak links for improvement. In this regard, the team’s analysis, assessment, and feedback are keys to achieving the objective of the project by determining the extent to which patient care is being improved and identifying areas that need to be improved.
As part of the project team, nurses and informaticists from the hospital further elucidate the hospital’s patient-centred, data-driven healthcare system. The health IT teams’ skills in clinical details and informatics knowledge serve as a significant link between the clinical and IT sectors, which ensures the project meets technical goals and enhances patient outcomes and care efficiency. Such a multifaceted team, which Nurse Informaticists will supervise, will promote the quality of patient care at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital by methodologically applying nursing informatics.
Conclusion
The efficiency and efficacy of care in St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital can be improved by utilizing advanced nursing informatics. The proposed initiative would play the role of a strategic investment in healthcare innovation, delivering evidence-based and patient-centric care, thus keeping St. Luke’s at the vanguard. The concerted efforts of the multidisciplinary project team, which are profoundly inclusive of the nurse informaticists’ involvement, will lead to the creation of a new standard of patient care levels at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital.
References
Carini, E., Villani, L., Pezzullo, A. M., Gentili, A., Barbara, A., Ricciardi, W., & Boccia, S. (2021). The Impact of Digital Patient Portals on Health Outcomes, System Efficiency, and Patient Attitudes: Updated Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(9), e26189–e26189. https://doi.org/10.2196/26189
Jouparinejad, S., Foroughameri, G., Khajouei, R., & Farokhzadian, J. (2020). Improving the informatics competency of Critical Care Nurses: Results of an interventional study in the southeast of Iran. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-020-01244-5
Moore, E. C., Tolley, C. L., Bates, D. W., & Slight, S. P. (2020). A systematic review of the impact of Health Information Technology on Nurses’ Time. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(5), 798–807. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz231
Uslu, A., & Stausberg, J. (2021). Value of the Electronic Medical Record for Hospital Care: Update From the Literature. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(12), e26323–e26323. https://doi.org/10.2196/26323
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