Informatic Nurse Case Study

Position and Role of Informatics Nurse For my informatics practicum, I was able to shadow Lanette Dykstra at Hegg Memorial Health Center in Rock Valley, Iowa. She has been doing informatics at the hospital for a few years. Being an informatics nurse is just one of the many hats she wears at work. Lanette is also one of the educators at the hospital as well as a case manager for the patients. As the informatics nurse, she communicates a lot with Avera in Sioux Falls. She is in constant communication with their informatician as well as her other supervisors. Lanette’s main job as the informatician at Hegg is to collect data from patient records and trend it to see how the hospital and staff are doing according to the data. She also looks at

She helped out with some of the informatics tasks because of her love for computers. She also helped out with the troubleshooting aspects of Meditech, the charting system used at the health center. She became a case manager for the hospital and her supervisors created a job for her in order for her to become one of the informatics nurses at the hospital. She has received numerous hours of training in Sioux Falls for informatics and also training on the Dragon system. Lanette enjoys being an informatician because she is able to help more patients as an informatician than she would being a nurse. She also gets to initiate change within the hospital based on the date she collects and trends over time. Her roles as case manager and nurse educator help her to have a well-rounded knowledge of the hospital, which helps her immensely because she can see where the need for change

Lanette has received training in Sioux Falls for her position. She has not been required to receive a higher degree in informatics yet, but that could be because of the multiple roles that she has in the hospital. Master’s and doctoral programs are available to nurses wishing to become informatics nurses. Informatics is an area that nurses should have at least a baseline knowledge of. However, many Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs do not include a course in nursing informatics (Ball,