Nursing Informatics Quality Improvement Plan - Essay Example

Nursing informatics is comparatively a new field when it is pitted against other functional roles of informatics. As such, the field is in its developing stage and is still plagued with numerous challenges e.g. coming up with a universal framework for developing informatics systems to aid the nursing profession. Similarly, existing nursing informatics systems are synonymous with quality improvement projects geared towards improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the systems. This paper thus presents an analysis of a quality improvement project.

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Statement of Problem

The existing informatics system is not able to meet the growing demands of the nursing department. The system was introduced when the department was small, but it has since grown in its number of professionals, patients served and data. Therefore, the project will aim at increasing the size of the system and improving its overall usability.

PDSA Cycle to be used

Plan: We are going to increasing the size of the system i.e. its data-holding capacity and number of users it can accommodate

Do: The quality improvement project will take 4 weeks and will call upon the expertise of nursing and IT professionals. Discussion of how duties will be assigned to these two groups is discussed later on.

Study: The results included a robust informatics system that can accommodate 50 users at once and can handle the input and retrieval of gigabytes of medical data.

Act: The system will require constant maintenance to identify and fix bugs.

Team

The project would call for the expertise of nursing professionals, informaticians and other relevant IT and medical professionals. The informaticians and IT experts will work on increasing the operational capabilities of the system and debugging it to ensure that it runs smoothly. They will be responsible for the complete overhaul of the system, redesigning it to ensure it can rise up to meet the ever-increasing demands of the department.

On the other hand, nurses and other medical professionals will be responsible for commenting on the usability of the system. They will be responsible for checking the system to see if it can perform its function i.e. they will help to make the system medical. They will give input on how the system should be designed and customized to allow for the input and retrieval of data that will facilitate the making of medical decisions.

Potential Obstacles

Working with people drawn from different departments is likely to pose a challenge to the success of the entire quality improvement project. This is because the departments involved in the project i.e. IT and nursing have varying methodologies of operations and it will be difficult to assimilate all these methodologies into the operations of the team. Also, group dynamics such as group thought, group conflict and conformity may put a strain on the operations of the project.

Literature

The existent literature on nursing informatics is concerned with a variety of issues including the definition of nursing informatics to using informatics to improve patient safety. There is also an emphasis on quality improvement on nursing informatics (Saba, & McCormick, 2015).

Common Procedure for Safeguarding Sensitive Health Information

The system will only be accessed by people with clearance to access it. Clearance will granted by the head of the nursing department. The system will also have a strong firewall in place.

Incorporation of Usability

As commented earlier on, the nursing and medical professionals in the team will be responsible for testing the usability of the system to ensure it runs smoothly. The system will also have a standardized terminology that will greatly improve its usability. According to Currie (2011), standardized terminology will allow nursing professionals to see and understand the worlds and computer will be able to decipher the numeric codes. Standardized terminology will also allow the reuse of data.

References

Currie, L. (2011). Informatics and Quality Improvement/Assurance. Longwoods.com. Retrieved from http://www.longwoods.com/content/22329Saba, V., & McCormick, K. (2015). Essentials of Nursing Informatics (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.