Research Paper on ICTs in Healthcare: Benefits, Strategies & Nurse Roles

Introduction

The use of ICTs in healthcare centres in inarguably beneficial. They may lead to improved patient-centred healthcare service, promote the general quality of care to the patients, and eventually provide enough technical knowhow to the professionals and the patients in the hospital about the general activities taking place (McCormick & Saba, 2015). Although, for the success of its implementation, it takes several changes and strategies for it to be to success. Since nurses play the most prominent role in nursing homes, with the duty of spearheading all the medications for the patients, the use of ICTs by nurses can substantially improve the workforce. The main aim of this study was to review the significance of using ICTs by the clinical informaticists in hospitals and how they influenced the actual quality of care (Duhamel et al., 2015). An example of the clinical systems that have been developed include electronic medical models, sometimes referred to as electronic medical records.

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Use of Electronic Medical Records in Nursing

Electronic health models or electronic medical records may be defined as a systematic collection and storage of patient's information electronically for safety and effectiveness. This records can be easily shared amongst the technicians in the health care by the recommended doctors. The models can be used by families as a transformation tool for meeting the needs and preferences of the patients (Ota et al., 2017). The models have the potentials of recording the performance of patient at all levels of the diagnosis or treatment, for this reason, even the new doctors can easily track the medication process of a patient without necessarily requesting for other unique documents.

Advantages Of Using EMR Systems

Patients

Using EMR models can improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment for the patients in the hospitals. This will be achieved because the systems are standardised to some of the human operations but a faster rate compared to the rates at which human beings could have done them. Computers are examples of gadgets that may be used to record patient records (Kulik et al., 2016). By using them, it is possible that many files which cannot be uploaded in paperwork will be included in the records. Also, it is faster when the process involved a pen and paper.

Spending less time in taking the patient's records may, in turn, create more time for the patients to interact with their nurses, for treatment and diagnosis. The outcome is thus, likely to improve when the time of interaction is adjusted. Similarly, the whole process may be efficient because the nurses will have more time to concentrate on the treatment rather than use much of the time in taking the personal records of the patients (Kulik et al., 2016).

Moreover, the use of EMR models can, in turn, minimise the occurrences of errors into the process of taking the records. The clinical software is automated with almost all the nursing calculations, and thus can easily manipulate the patient's data and store them in a more straightforward manner that allows for faster retrieval. Nonetheless, the use of ICTs can also convert the patient data into figures like mean, mode, median and standard deviation.

These measures can be used to interpret the patient data efficiently, and define profoundly on the most effective solutions to help in addressing the problems in the nursing. Besides, the system can detect a problem or fault in one of its steps, or procedures, and this will help all the nursing fraternity to decide on the solutions to assist in fixing the error (Top et al.., 2015).

This generates the third and most crucial advantage of the process in regards to the decision making the process.

Occasionally, clinical informaticists have worked so hard to lower the task of the nurses, especially when handling the treatment for the highly sensitive disorders like heart-related. The diseases may include high blood pressure of other chronic diseases. In hospitals with advanced ICTs systems, the EMR systems are usually initialised in the patient rooms with all the relevant procedures for the offering diagnosis and treatment of the disease (Ota et al., 2017). Nurses can then easily counter check if at all, they are doing the correct procedures while offering the treatment.

However, the main reason for their presence is that, in some cases, a doctor may be having personal stress that might alter his/her mental functioning, and thus end up using a wring procedure. The primary importance of these systems in such occasions is that, if in case it detects a problem, it will instantly warn the attendee and provide the correct diagnosis. They will also send alarms to other prospective nurses to note them of a fault.

Medical Practice Team

In collaboration or partnership with the ICT experts in nursing like the system analysts, system administrator, among others, the medical practice team can also realise vast range of advantages which indicate an improvement in the quality of outcome for the patients and the effectiveness of the services. Some of the ways by which this statement may be rendered as fact include nut not limited to;

The nurses in the ICT team of the medication process may be able to share patient information from one department to another more quickly without putting so much stress (Top et al.., 2015). This will help in that, suppose a patient need to be promoted from one level to another, either in search of a better or improved medical attention, or instead rest after receiving treatment, the IT experts would just send the data into the departments, such that by the time a patient reached the branch, all the details shall have been organized in readiness to serve the patient strictly (Feo & Kitson, 2016). This will also make it faster for the treatment services to be of more quality and even much effective.

Reviewed Articles Summary

Feo and Kitson, (2016), does a research on maintaining the health standards, by making care primarily more of patient's centered. The knowledge gained from this article has assisted health professionals and other health providers the understanding and benefits of making patients the highest priority. It has therefore motivated a lot of inventions and innovations in the field of health, use of EMR systems being at the core.

Kulik, Foad and Brown, (2016) further illustrates how the process of adopting the use of EMR systems in the health care units have evolutionary grown progressively in different stages. This intervention technique that involves gradual implementation of a new system from the old system is referred to as phased approach. Kulik and the other two authors have helped the nurses and clinicians in to understand how efficient it is to adopt the changes in steps without creating confusions and various complexities. One of the prominent benefits that this has resulted to is; nurses have been able to keenly follow up the entire process when it's divided into distinct phases. It has thus reduced the mortality rate in the hospitals as EMR systems are properly launched by the clinical informaticists.

McCormick and Saba, (2015) discusses on the core essentials of having nursing informatics in the health centers. The two authors gives the major reason for having nursing education on how to use the EMR systems. Offering education to nurses have assisted nurses to efficiently implement and also share with the patients the need to provide even their confidential information promising them that with the use of EMR models, all information remains secured.

Ota, Inagaki, Fujiwara and Azuma, (2017) did a study on how best critical health conditions like heart related diseases, high blood pressure and cancer can be dealt with. The three authors states that the use of EMR systems can be very beneficial I situations where nurses are undergoing critical conditions like cancer. This is because, the informaticists have developed the models in a manner that, they contain all the health procedures to be used during the treatment to alert the doctors by identifying to them the possible error that have occurred.

Top, Yilmaz, Karabulut, Otieno, Saylam, Bakir and Top, (2015) finalizes the study by performing a random questionnaire on the nurses from turkey, to collect their views concerning their experience on the use of EMR systems. Most of them states that, its introduction have made the health operations become much easier and faster as well, as most activities that were initially being performed by humans are now replaced by the system. As a result, the authors in their recommendations suggest that the use of EMR systems be made compulsory to all healthcare's globally.

References

Duhamel, F., Dupuis, F., Turcotte, A., Martinez, A. M., & Goudreau, J. (2015). Integrating the illness beliefs model in clinical practice: A family systems nursing knowledge utilisation model. Journal of Family Nursing, 21(2), 322-348. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1074840715579404

Feo, R., & Kitson, A. (2016). Promoting patient-centred primary care in acute healthcare systems. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 57, 1-11. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020748916000079

Kulik, C. M., Foad, W., & Brown, G. (2016). A Multi-Phased Approach to Using Clinical Data to Drive Evidence-Based EMR Redesign. Retrieved from https://sigma.nursingrepository.org/handle/10755/616291

McCormick, K., & Saba, V. (2015). Essentials of nursing informatics. McGraw-Hill Education. Retrieved from https://lib.hpu.edu.vn/handle/123456789/32430

Ota, H., Inagaki, M., Fujiwara, N., & Azuma, M. (2017). Electronic medical record systems-based simulation for practicum in critical care nursing. J. Nurs. Educ. Pract., 8(4), 96. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a8e5/dc314f68f3448564e655277fe1fea281a0d1.pdf

Top, M., Yilmaz, A., Karabulut, E., Otieno, O. G., Saylam, M., Bakir, S., & Top, S. (2015). Validation of a nurses' views on electronic medical record systems (EMR) questionnaire in the Turkish health system. Journal of medical systems, 39(6), 67. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10916-015-0250-2