Nursing Informatics for Today: Nursing Leadership+Technology = Improved Quality Care, Safety of Patients, Improved Outcomes and Work Settings

Nursing Leadership + Technology = Improvement of Quality Care, safety of patients, improved outcomes and work settings.

Nursing Excellence
Nurse Leaders

Technology is the way of the future and the health care field needs to embrace technology and use it to improve the quality of care that is given, increase the safety of patients, improve patient outcomes and work settings. There are many technologies that will change the practice of nursing in the near future. A couple of examples of those are robotics, 3-D printing, biometrics, electronic health records.
Provider order entry and clinical decision support. In general, technology improves efficiency and reduces errors. There has to be a fine balance between what can be done and what should be done. As nurse leaders, we can influence the implementation of technology as a profession. Technology is being introduced as a way to decrease errors and costs and maintaining quality, safe care.

Nurse leaders need to create an environment that engages the staff through shared decision making and implementation of technology. Staff buy in helps in the implementation stage and compliance. The nurse leader needs to have an understanding of the technology to be able to put the right equipment in the hands of the nurses that need it to provide quality safe care.

In the nursing profession, nurses can no longer be the keeper of the knowledge. They must learn to become the collectors of data, analyze the data and share it with others to improve care. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine suggested that the way nurses were educated in the 20th century is not adequate for the every changing and complexity of health care in the 21st century. Nurses need the skills to deliver high quality care including leadership, health policy, system improvement, research and evidence based practice, team work and collaboration.

As leaders, we need to make sure that the human connection is not lost with the patients. We need to be involved in the implementation of technology to make sure that the innovation does not exclude the human element.

A second way that nurse leaders need to forge ahead with technology implementation is assuring that technical use is ethical. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should. We as a profession need to remain advocates for the patients and keep their best interests in mind. Nurse leaders need to ask how and why an innovation is going to be implemented and help to set parameters for its use.

Lastly, nurse leaders are going to help to bridge the clinical nurse and technology. Nurses are going to have to be trained in new technologies and remain competent in the skills. Nurses cannot provide care without information. As leaders, we must provide educational models and leadership training programs to ensure that nurses have the skills needed to address the emerging technology. Nurses as a profession need to take the lead on this and use foreshadowing, and evidence based practice to use across the continuum of care and across the interdisciplinary team.

Nurse leaders need to have a working relationship with the IT department and other administrators of the organization so that they understand the influence that nursing care has on patient outcomes. By connecting these dots and with the role out of pay for performance programs, if nurse leaders can help effect patient outcomes, goals of the organization can also be met.