Everything I know about Informatics, I Didn't Learn in Nursing School

[rninformatics, DNP, RN]

From Vol 6, No 4 of Electronic Healthcare 2008; [Originally published in Nursing Leadership 2007;20(3): 22-25.]

"Everything I know about Informatics, I Didn't Learn in Nursing School"

A "call to arms" for increasing informatics proficency in our nursing faculty AND for integrating informatics competencies into nursing education.

Plus I love the title!

Enjoy!

Informatics_NrsgSchoo.pdf

[jjjoy, LPN]

"Informatics" sounds way too general for the average health discipline basic intro to electronic health records. Nursing and other health disciplines should incorporate the use of electronic media into the curriculum as it WILL be something that they will work with everyday in almost any job. I could imagine the school having a couple of different sample EMR programs with several sample cases where students could practice pulling up data and doing electronic charting. Of course, the system would be different wherever they ended up working, but they would already have some level of comfort using different EMR systems.

Ensuring students are competent in free form charting (narrative/SOAP/etc) or filling out a pre-set form is a separate issue from ensuring students are comfortable with working on a computer. If someone is good at charting on paper and is familiar with computers, there's no reason that they shouldn't be able to easily transfer that skill to a computer.