Informatics: The Tiger Project

A year ago, more than one hundred nursing leaders representing seventy organizations met to define a unified, collective vision for the future, one that bridges the quality chasm using information technology. On November 1, 2006, the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) Summit participants defined action steps that the nursing profession can take to better prepare our nursing workforce to use technology and informatics with the goal of improving the delivery of patient care. Today a practicing nurse’s portfolio of necessary skills includes computer literacy, information literacy, and informatics skills. The TIGER Initiative is focused on helping the nursing profession to adopt informatics tools, principles, theories, and practices that make healthcare safer and more effective, efficient, patient-centered, and equitable for all stakeholders. The executive summary report and recommendations from the TIGER Summit are available online at www.tigersummit.com.



While the TIGER Initiative started out as a grass-roots effort to engage all stakeholders who are committed to a common “vision” of an ideal electronic health record (EHR) for nursing practice, today more than 120 diverse organizations are joining this effort. While the original 70 organizations that attended the Summit work towards completing their strategic action plans, additional nursing professionals have joined the TIGER Initiative to collaborate on nine important topics. These nine topics include:

1. Standards and Interoperability
2. Healthcare Information Technology National Agenda/Policy
3. Informatics Competencies
4. Education and Faculty Development
5. Staff Development/Continuing Education
6. Usability/Clinical Application Design
7. Virtual Demonstration Center
8. Leadership Development
9. Consumer Empowerment/Personal Health Record

As of this writing, 280 nurses have volunteered their expertise to work on the nine collaborative teams.

Each collaborative team is lead by an industry expert on the specific topic. The goal of each collaborative team is to share their findings and recommendations with all practicing nurses and nursing students through targeted outreach activities. Examples of the materials that the collaborative teams are developing include presentations, white papers, webinars, and articles for publication in specialty journals and textbooks.

The diverse background of the nurses participating in this initiative is unparalleled. Participants represent the interests of nursing professional organizations, nursing informatics organizations, government agencies, information technology vendors, industry partners, non-profit organizations, healthcare provider organizations, and academic institutions. Together these teams are reaching out to gather case studies, examples of innovative practice and education models, publications, and ongoing research programs that represent a diversity of nursing professionals both in educational preparation and practice experiences. These teams are concurrently developing mechanisms to enhance collaboration between professional organizations, government and policy-making agencies, and industry partners to specifically address the educational needs of the nursing workforce so they can better use technology to improve the delivery of patient care....