Have you considered specializing in healthcare informatics? If so, a job as an IT nurse may be well-suited for you. Keep reading to learn more about working in nursing informatics.
What is Nursing Informatics?
Nursing informatics is a field of nursing that integrates nursing, information, and informatics to develop nursing systems and data in general to improve patient care—for example, electronic medical records, screenable test results, nursing notes, or medication records. Instead of using paper and pencil, programs and systems ensure that information is available and error-free and can even help calculate dosages to avoid problems for patients and nurses.
Informatics Nurses
Nursing informatics is a specialty. This specialty integrates nursing with informatics to analyze and communicate data, knowledge, information, and data management for nursing.
Informaticists in nursing are those who manage, integrate information, create new software or equipment, and innovate processes, structure, and technology for the use of nursing and medicine to benefit patients. Thanks to nursing informatics, complex devices can be used to save and improve patients' lives or help their care in general.
Most nurses with this specialty will be dedicated to:
- Updating systems, developing them, and ensuring they are helpful for the care of the patients, doing so through studies and evidence.
- Getting all paper records converted to digital forms and ensuring that everyone in the hospital can access them and knows how to use and run them.
- Develop technological interfaces to improve patient care and use user feedback to improve the hospital's quality of care.
- Improve policies by communicating with governmental agents so that healthcare technology is supported.
- Work side by side with other informaticians to improve the systems they might already have.
The functions of an IT nurse may vary from place to place, but in general, their primary function is to provide a better quality of care through technology.
How to Become an IT Nurse?
To become an IT nurse, it is necessary first to become an RN (registered nurse). Once the RN degree and license are obtained, nurses must complete a master's degree in nursing informatics, which is highly recommended to work as an IT nurse. While these skills can be obtained through other courses, the master's degree opens doors to better jobs and a better chance of becoming an IT Nurse. Having this specialty and experience in the field is convenient since the pay for an IT nurse is relatively high. It is estimated that with minimum experience in the field, the salary ranges from $61,000 to $85,000, and with a lot of experience, it goes up to over $100,000 per year on average.
Working in informatics as a nurse is a big challenge, as integrating human systems with technology is not easy. However, nursing needs these systems to evolve to a higher quality of care and benefits patients and all healthcare staff, especially to have the ability to have all the necessary data on screen and at the user's fingertips. For these and many other reasons, IT nurses are critically important.
There are several branches of informatics to work for an IT nurse. For example, clinical informatics specialists, nursing informatics specialists, and clinical nurse analysts.
- Clinical informatics specialists work with data within the clinics, from the data, and images from the practices performed in the clinic or hospital.
- A nursing informatics specialist is a nurse who uses all of their nursing knowledge and skills and combines them with informatics to analyze data, whether it is data on positive or negative outcomes when caring for a patient or the ability to coach nurses through technology.
- Clinical nurse analysts are responsible for analyzing and interpreting complex data provided by all the computer systems in the hospital or clinic, where they work to improve care systems and ensure better patient care, patient safety, service efficiency, etc.
No matter which branch of IT nursing is chosen, the qualities and experience of a good nurse are needed to make these systems function at their best and integrate humanely into the hospital's operations.
There are many ways to focus technology on nursing. An obvious example is the Nursa app, which provides the opportunity for all healthcare professionals, especially nurses (including IT nurses), to connect directly with hospitals to find better-paying and secure jobs. This app provides the opportunity to have better salaries, to choose schedules according to the convenience of the nurses, and to search for areas that nurses are interested in.
