How Informatics Can Be Utilized in Capturing Valuable Data Are Used in the Improvement of Nursing Practice

Introduction

The efforts to define the quality of nursing was initiated by Florence Nightingale when she worked towards the improvement of conditions in hospitals and the measurement of patient outcomes. In recent years, studies have shown that adverse patient outcomes and hospital nursing staffing issues are linked. In turn, the participation of individuals and attention have increased leading the consideration of indicating that impact the quality of care with the healthcare system. This quality measure in nursing practice affects three aspects of nursing care including process, structure, and outcomes. This paper discusses process and outcome measures and how informatics can be utilized in capturing valuable data are used in the improvement of nursing practice.

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Measures in nursing practice are vital in the assessment and comparing of the quality of health care organizations. One of these measures is the process measure which defines the methods that can be used in nursing interventions and patient assessment. It indicates the techniques used by providers of healthcare service to the maintenance or improvement of health among those individuals who have been diagnosed with a healthcare condition or healthy people. The measure usually shows the recommendations for clinical practice that have generally been accepted. Examples of process measures include the percentage of individuals with diabetes whose blood sugar was tested and controlled.

Another example is the percentage of people who are receiving preventive care such immunization within healthcare organizations. Process measures are essential in informing the consumers about the conventional medical care for disease and help in the improvement of health outcomes. It is majorly used in public reporting of health care quality measures.

In the collection of data related to processing measure indicator such as the percentage of patients followed on a clinical pathway, it is crucial to determine the metrics to be used. This indicator helps in ensuring that patient care within a healthcare organization is continuous improvement. Therefore, the data to be collected for this study will assist in defining the quality of care given to consumers in an organization (Berwick, 2016). The primary data to be collected in this quality measure is the number of patients who are followed in a clinical pathway and those who were not. The information is correlated with respective years, to help develop the trend. Therefore, the first step in this process measure is the collection of relevant information. Then, correlation is conducted to create a pattern, which will help understand the improvement in patient care. The staff within the healthcare organization will then be interviewed to determine their perceptions.

The data used in the measurement of the quality of care through the determination of the percentage of patients followed on a clinical pathway can be obtained from the various sources within a healthcare organization. The data might be collected from the medical record systems, risk management databases, and decision support systems (Moore et al., 2015). After the indicator has been measured, the percentage observed is mapped on a graph against their respective years to determine their relationship. Through the analysis of the graphed data, an individual can evaluate the continual improvement of the patient care. The quality of the care within the organization can then be continuously monitored to help identify improvement in the process.

Various stakeholder will take part in the determination of process measures when measuring the quality of healthcare. One of the primary stakeholders is the advanced registered nurse since they are the one closest to the patients. These nurses are crucial to obtaining an accurate that show the quality of patient care in the system. During the recording of these data, nurses are expected to minimize clinical process errors of commission or omission. Eventually, they help in reducing case mix bias by expressing errors as a function of opportunities for those errors, which is critical to the adjustment or at least in part for the case mix bias. In this process, other stakeholders such as doctors and medical record individuals play a crucial role since they determine whether the information recorded is correct; hence the quality is measured correctly (Jette et al., 2015). The patient also plays a critical role in the measure of the quality of patient care, by providing the nurses and other stakeholders with the necessary information that will help in the mapping of the quality provided within the healthcare organization.

The communication of the planned process to implement the measure of the quality of patient care will involve the use of necessary channels that will help reach each stakeholder. The communication starts with the choosing of an effective outlet such as the media or conference that will help me relay the required message to the individuals who are involved in the improvement of the quality of process within healthcare organizations. Besides, the implementation process of the recommendation to help improve the quality identified through the assessment of diagnostic errors as well as the appropriateness of therapeutic and diagnostic interventions. Furthermore, it is essential to show the necessary leadership skills such as cooperation and feedback as a means to motivate and keep track of the progress of the implementation team and improve their effectiveness.

Outcome Measure

Another quality measure in nursing practice is outcome measures. It is vital in the reflection of patient outcomes, which are known to be nursing-sensitive due to their dependence on the quality or quantity of nursing care. They, therefore indicate the effect of health care intervention or service on the status of the patients' health. Examples of outcome measures include the rate of infections acquired in a hospital or surgical complications and the percentage of surgical mortality rates. Despite, this measure seems to be the most crucial in determination of quality, several factors impact outcomes, which are hard to control by health care providers. However, risk adjustment can be used to help reduce misleading reports or inaccurate information on the quality of health care.

One of the main characteristics of the outcome measure is that it is the result of various factors that health providers cannot control. Therefore, risk adjustment methods are used to help in the account for these factors. These methods are described as mathematical models whose primary objective is to aid in the correction of the different characteristics of the individuals such as the health status of the patients. Besides, the use of risk adjustment method is still an evolving matter; hence its use is still not clearly defined as required. Therefore, the better the method of risk adjustment, the lower the reporting of inaccurate or misleading information regarding the quality of health care.

The measure of outcome in a healthcare organization involves the changes that occur in an individual or population as a result of intervention by healthcare providers. The measure of an outcome includes the use of differed measurement at the different time of the intervention including before, during and after the intervention and related changes to the interventions. In the measurement of the rate of surgical complications or infections that are acquired in hospitals as an outcome measure, the plan involves the use of the available data with the organization to help determine these factors. In this scenario, the first step will include acquiring of the data from the database of the organization to identify the trends in the rate of hospital-acquired infections or surgical complications within the healthcare in the previous years. Secondly, necessary data of interventions involving patients at the time and obtain real-time information on the current outcome quality within the organization are obtained (Porter, Larsson, & Lee, 2015). Since there is no ideal method to measure outcomes, this information can help us to answer the necessary question of the rate of surgical complications or hospital-acquired infections. The data obtained are then used to indicate the performance of the health care organization about its treatment process. The information from the database is then used to calculate the rate of the complications or infections acquired in hospitals and the results compared to identify the most effective treatments and hence provision of the most benefits to patients.

Data mapping can be defined as the process that involves the matching of the data obtained from the database with the information that is required for the reporting of the quality measure. In this scenario, since the procedure involves determining the quality of the outcome of the healthcare organization, the data obtained should include those who patient who got surgical complication and those who did not as well as those who acquired infections at hospitals and those who did not. The rate is then determined using the two sets of data, to report the clinical quality. The primary data required are the number of those individuals with surgical complications among the total who underwent surgery in the healthcare institution. These two sets of data are the most vital in the calculation of the required rates.

The medical records personnel are the crucial stakeholders in the process of obtaining these sets of data for the study. Besides providing the required information, they play a critical role in ensuring that the data entered into the system are correct and accurate (Nelson et al., 2015). Hence, the information obtained from mapping the data is an accurate representation of the quality of outcome in the healthcare organization. Also, nurses and other health practitioners are essential, since they help in the determination of correct analysis of the situation of the patients and hence contributing significantly to the measurement of the outcome within the healthcare organization in the determination of the quality of patient care.

It is crucial to consider the ethical considerations to keep the privacy of the patients, whose data was used in the measuring of outcomes. It forms an essential aspect of the study process since the revelation of the patients' data is a wrong ethical procedure. The communication of the obtained information is crucial to the measuring of the outcome since it is the process through which the findings are disseminated to the stakeholders, hence revealing the quality of patient outcome in an organization (Kuhn, 2016). The communication process will involve the use of various sources such as newsletter and conferences to educate the stakeholders on the quality outcome measures as well as providing the solutions to the problems that are identified. The primary leadership skill required is communication since it is crucial for the report to reach the audience in an accurate and timely manner, hence increasing the chances of success of the measure of outcomes. Also, cooperation and responsibility plays a critical role in the dissemination and following up of the reported findings.

References

Berwick, D. M. (2016). Era 3 for medicine and health care. Jama, 315(13), 1329-1330.

Jette, D. U., Halbert, J., Iverson, C., Miceli, E., & Shah, P. (2016). Use of standardized outcome measures in physical therapist practice: perceptions and applications. Physical therapy, 89(2), 125-135.

Kuhn, J. E. (2016). Why Measure Outcomes?. Instructional course lectures, 65, 583-586.

Moore, G. F., Audrey, S., Barker, M., Bond, L., Bonell, C., Hardeman, W., ... & Baird, J. (2015). Process evaluation of complex interventions: Medical Research Counc...