Article 3: Nursing Informatics

What is Nursing Informatics? This is the first question that pop into my head after i saw the title of the article. Based on Wikipedia, there are various different definition of Nursing Informatics have been proposed. The most widely currently accepted definition comes from the International Medical Informatics Association - Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group adopted August 1998, Seoul, Korea:

"Nursing informatics is the integration of nursing, its information, and information management with information processing and communication technology, to support the health of people world wide."

A more recent definition of Nursing Informatics comes from the American Nurses Association's Scope and Standards for Nursing Informatics Practice (2008):

"Nursing Informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice."

Based on this article, Nursing Informatics is the term that is used to describe the cross-functional interrelationship between nursing concepts, and information resources and technology. The article explained how the term evolved into two basic meanings in the last few years. The two basic meanings refer to the broad needs that all nurses have to be information savvy -- to be able to use information access tools, information technology resources, and computerized systems on the job and also refer nursing informatics as a nursing specialty. In this article, there are also few opinions and responses that collected from nurses about the impacts of the information age on their jobs.

After reading this article, I get some idea on how Nursing Informatics influence a nurse in the hospital and more understand what actually Nursing Informatics is.

For full article, you can visit this link: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~tsmalley/NrsgInformatics.html

For more definition of Nursing Informatics, you may visit this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursing_informatics