Electronic Informatics In Nursing

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, e-prescribing is defined as "the transmission using electronic media, of prescription or prescription-related information between a prescriber, dispenser, pharmacy benefit manager, or health plan, either directly or through an intermediary, including an e-prescribing network" (Kaye, 2008) Nursing is a subspecialty in informatics with different roles and tasks. The focus of informatics nursing has varying job descriptions and specialties within healthcare, however, the main focus of nursing informatics can be found in any of the following areas; 1.) Using data, information and knowledge in patient care, 2.) Defining data in patient care, 3.) Acquiring and delivering patient care knowledge,

One significant barrier is the potential detrimental impact on physician and staff workflow. Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely instead on their own judgment. A study, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute showed that most clinicians find the current medication alerts a task of annoyance rather than a valuable tool for patient safety. Although the e-prescribing alert with improve medication safety, we the society will not see its benefit until there is a system to help clinicians better manage medication safety alerts. This study shed a light on the real value of e-prescribing alerts in the eyes of our clinicians. The results of this study are quite frightening, but one must know that clinicians in general override more that 90 percent of the drug interactions alerts and 77 percent of the drug allergy alerts. This high override rate of all alerts suggest that most clinicians see the utility of electronic medication alerts as very insufficient. The clinicians would rather have a system that alerts on e-prescribing at the right time for the right patient. This means that clinicians would like the system to be improved and separate out patients who have used a

While not sure why this was happening as most medical offices and hospitals I decided that I would like to find the real reason why most our peers have chosen to skip this step or even better yet completely ignore it. After many hours of research I realized that the value of e-prescribing alerts is more of an issue than most would acquire. According to the study of merits of e-prescribing drug alerts in primary care one concludes that although primary care prescribers recognize the patient safety value of drug prescribing alerts, they indicate to override these drug-drug interactions at least 40 percent of the time. One request made by the participant of this study that I found very attention-grabbing was that the physicians would like to address the sensitivity of alerts and its unnecessariness. Our physicians would like to see these drug alerts run only on active medications and there be a threshold set by the prescriber on its severity, not the electronic health record