Informatics continues to grow and plays a major part of the healthcare system. It is vital for all healthcare providers to have at least a basic understanding of informatics. Patient safety is the number one goal in healthcare, it is drilled into your heads while in nursing school. So, it is not surprising to see it be a major focus in the role informatics plays. One aspect that we will focus on is how nursing informatics helps reduce nosocomial infections, specifically catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI’s). CAUTI’s are caused by prolonged use of an indwelling catheter, also known as a Foley Catheter. “ In excess of 500,000 CAUTIs occur annually in the United States, accounting for more than 30% of healthcare-associated …show more content…
As nurses become more educated about nursing informatics, they will gain the skills needed to master and apply nursing informatics to nursing practice. It is important that nurses have informatics skills because it saves nurses’ plenty of time. The implementation of the electronic health record (EHR) allows for easier and more efficient data-entry and access to patient health information. This electronic documentation of patient health history saves nurses the time it takes to manually write and/or obtain patient health records. By becoming more skilled in nursing informatics, nurses will learn to be more familiar with the electronic data-entry and data-retrieval processes, allowing for less time recording and retrieving information, and more time at the bedside with …show more content…
First, when planning a client care plan, nurses must establish priorities and optimal outcomes of care that are measureable and can lead to a successful evaluation. The “SMART” mnemonic acronym is a guide process that is similar to the nursing process by using critical thinking to assess the problem and innervate a plan that can later be evaluated. (Claire, S.) The nurse should keep this process in mind that will help contribute to creating a successful care plan by making sure the goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and Time-bound. Nurses work with clients to identify goals and successful outcomes. Informatics is helpful because one would be able to use the collected data to research previous care plans or other methods that had worked previously. Clinicians may use informatics systems (e.g. EMR to coordinate care and share information with other