NURS 6401 Week 2 definition paper example

One Definition of Nursing Informatics, Tested Against an Analyst Who Never Meets a Patient and a Night Nurse During a Planned Downtime

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 6401: Informatics in Nursing and Healthcare

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Definition of Nursing Informatics, Tested Against an Analyst Who Never Meets a Patient and a Night Nurse During a Planned Downtime

This paper adopts the definition of nursing informatics in the current scope and standards of practice (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2022) and keeps it for the length of the paper, including where it fits badly. In my own words, that definition treats nursing informatics as a nursing specialty that combines nursing science with information science and analytics, so that data are transformed into the information and knowledge that nurses, patients and others need, using technology in service of health outcomes, safety, quality and equity. Earlier definitions put the computer at the center; a critical analysis of how the definitions evolved argued that the field should instead be defined by nursing data, information and knowledge and by the decisions they support (Staggers & Thompson, 2002). I chose the ANA definition because it carries that shift and because it is the one the specialty's practicing nurses are held to. The test of a definition is what it does with the cases at its edges, so this paper spends most of its length on two of them.

The Definition in Parts

Four parts of the definition do the work in what follows. It is a nursing specialty, which ties the work to nursing's body of knowledge and to a nursing license. Its material is data, information and knowledge, which echoes the sequence proposed when the field was first described as the study of how nursing data become information and then knowledge (Graves & Corcoran, 1989). Its purpose is support for decisions by nurses, patients and others. Technology is a means, named but not central. A case belongs inside the definition if it involves nursing data moving toward a decision someone needs to make, and it sits outside if the work would be the same with no nursing knowledge applied to it.

Test Case 1: The Analyst Who Builds a Nursing Report

A clinical informatics nurse on our hospital's team spends most of her week building reports. The latest one pulls every neurological check documented on our unit and shows, by shift, how often a change in level of consciousness was followed within an hour by a documented notification of the provider. She has not cared for a patient in four years and never meets the patients in the report.

Under the ANA definition, this work is clearly nursing informatics, and the reason is not her license alone. The report depends on nursing knowledge at every step. She had to know that a drop of two points on the Glasgow Coma Scale means something different from a drop of one, that some changes are expected after sedation and should be excluded, and that a notification may be documented in a note rather than in the flowsheet field built for it. A programmer without that knowledge could produce a report that runs perfectly and counts the wrong things. The data are nursing data, the transformation into information requires nursing judgment, and the purpose is a decision by nurse managers about where practice is slipping. Distance from the bedside does not remove the case from the definition; the knowledge applied does the work.

Test Case 2: The Night Nurse During a Planned Downtime

During a four-hour planned downtime for an upgrade, the paper forms our unit was supposed to use had no row for the time of the last pupil check, and a colleague on nights drew a small grid on the back of each patient's form: time, left pupil, right pupil, initials. When the system returned, she used the grid to enter every check with the time it was really done, not the moment it was keyed in. Nobody asked her to do it, and she would not call it informatics.

The definition covers her, but only just, and this is where it pinches. She moved nursing data from one form to another without losing what made it useful, and she did it so that the record would support later decisions about those patients. That fits the purpose and the material. What fits less comfortably is the word specialty. She was not practicing a specialty; she was doing what a careful nurse does when a tool fails. If the definition includes her, it includes most of nursing, and a specialty that includes most of its parent discipline is hard to distinguish from it. I conclude that her work is informatics practice by a generalist nurse, which the definition allows when it describes informatics competencies all nurses need, but it is not the specialty itself. The distinction is uncomfortable, and I would rather name it than switch to a definition that avoids the question.

What the Definition Rules Out

A definition is only useful if something falls outside it. Under this one, installing and maintaining the hardware on which the record runs is not nursing informatics, even when nurses benefit, because no nursing knowledge is needed to do it well. Buying a system on price alone is not nursing informatics either, though choosing among systems by how well they support nursing workflow is. Neither is documentation itself: charting a pupil check is nursing practice, and it becomes informatics only when someone designs, examines or improves how that check is captured and used. Drawing these lines matters because hospitals staff and fund roles on the basis of what the work is. A definition that includes everything technical would justify replacing informatics nurses with analysts, and one that includes all documentation would make the specialty invisible.

Conclusion

The ANA definition holds up against both cases. It includes the analyst because her work depends on nursing knowledge, not because of her title, and it reaches the night nurse only through its account of competencies every nurse needs, which leaves the specialty itself intact. Its weakest point is the word specialty, which the definition uses without saying how much of the work a generalist nurse can do before it becomes specialty practice. That is a question I will carry into the rest of this course.

References

American Nurses Association. (2022). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice (3rd ed.).

Graves, J. R., & Corcoran, S. (1989). The study of nursing informatics. Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 21(4), 227-231. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1547-5069.1989.tb00148.x

Staggers, N., & Thompson, C. B. (2002). The evolution of definitions for nursing informatics: A critical analysis and revised definition. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 9(3), 255-261. https://doi.org/10.1197/jamia.M0946