DNP-805A: health care informatics course provides the foundations for using technology to support and improve patient care and healthcare systems. The course is designed to provide the tools needed to manage individual and aggregate level information and use information systems/technology to evaluate programs of care, outcomes of care, and care systems using industry standards and related ethical, regulatory, and legal principles. Learners are expected to integrate and synthesize core program competencies and specialty practice requirements necessary to demonstrate proficiency in advanced nursing practice.
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What is health informatics?
Health informatics is the practice of acquiring, studying, and managing health data and applying medical concepts in combination with health information technology systems to aid clinicians to deliver better healthcare.
What is clinical informatics?
Clinical informatics is used in direct patient care. It helps in supplying medical staff with information used to develop a care plan. Clinical informaticists (people who have specialized in clinical informatics) analyze data or medical images or help clinicians to retrieve that information. Moreover, they can also create interfaces to health IT systems to aid clinical caregivers more easily view and use health data.
What is nursing informatics?
Nursing informatics is another type of health informatics. It involves nurses’ interactions with health IT systems.
Role of nursing informatics specialists.
Nursing informatics specialists document accurately the transitions of care. For instance, when a patient is going from an ambulatory setting to a hospital setting, or from a hospital to a rehabilitation center.
Likewise, nursing informatics is also still growing as an educational field in which students can obtain academic certificates and degrees.
What is public health informatics?
Public health informatics is the application of computer science, information, and technology to the administration of public health, including disease surveillance, prevention, preparedness, and health education.
Benefits of public health informatics.
Public health informatics directs government and nonprofit health administrators in making data-driven decisions about public health policies and programs.
Ways in which DNP-805A: health care informatics course helps to improve patient care.
1. Maintained electronic health records.
A big number of patients visit several health care providers. Therefore, paper-based records make safely managing a patient’s prescriptions hard as these medical records do not get consolidated across physicians, specialists, laboratories, and hospitals. Nevertheless, electronic health record (EHR) systems enable the handling and management of patient records with ease and safety. Thus, patients no longer need to summarize their medical past within the stress of emergency situations. Parents also no longer need to get concerned about forgetting pediatrician names or losing immunization records in case of relocation.
Rather, medical staff already has much of the patient information available in the EHR to reference when the patient enters a medical facility. Thus, there is less paperwork and fewer, shorter forms for patients to fill out.
2. Reduced costs.
Informaticians excel at reducing medical errors. In addition, they work to take many labor-intensive tasks out of the squeezed schedules of the medical staff. They do this by automating these routines thus saving the healthcare industry and patients extreme costs. In addition, they also reduce the repeating of testing or blood work since the EHRs enable health care providers to view test results and records. Thus, it helps to reduce hospital bills.
3. Less trial and error.
EHRs guarantee that patients get the right medicine the first time to prevent allergic reactions to antibiotics or other medicines. In addition, they also alert physicians before prescribing a specific drug if it displays dangerous interactions with medication already in use by the patient.
In short, these systems assist to take human error thus ensuring the provision of efficient and quality medical care.
4. Improved ability to self-manage diseases.
Patients’ application of a physician’s directions determines better provision of medical care more than actual medical advice. Therefore, it is crucial to increase patient education. Trained health informaticians organize information about what methods and materials best help patients. Thus, they motivate them to follow prescription directions and clinician’s orders. Most importantly, patients progressively profit from this more well-rounded approach to the medical world that allows for better solutions on both the doctor’s and the patient’s side.
