The health care industry’s continued reliance on paper astounds Lillee Gelinas, vice president and chief nursing officer at VHA Inc., an alliance of hospitals and non-acute-care facilities.
Gelinas was making rounds at a major hospital recently when she came upon a familiar sight: a nurse struggling with a huge pile of paper files. A work shift had just ended, and Gelinas assumed the nurse was catching up on the day’s charts. Instead, the nurse told her she had come in on her day off to manually gather data for review by the hospital’s quality committee, which was meeting the following day.
“We have a nursing shortage going on,” Gelinas said. “Is that the best use of people’s time?”
As the country faces a protracted nursing shortage and increased concerns about patient safety, health care vendors and policy-makers are beginning to focus more attention on frontline caregivers and the information technology they need to do their jobs. Moreover, nurses are becoming more involved in the development, procurement and deployment of next-generation IT solutions.
“Nurses are at the forefront of leading change,” said Linda Kloss, chief executive officer of the American Health Information Management Association and leader of the American Health Information Community’s Health IT Workforce Panel. “It is essential that attention be paid to nursing’s role in health IT.”
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