AyurvedaDosha.com

If you wonder what nursing informatics is and what role nursing informatics play in medical world, you should know that advancement in medical technology has dramatically changed and there is much better way to take care of patient and to support them recovering faster. Evidence based nursing informatics solutions has improved nursing communication, documentation and overall efficacy.

What is Nursing Informatics?

“Nursing Informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice. Nursing informatics facilitates the integration of data, information and knowledge to support patients, nurses and other providers in their decision-making in all roles and settings. This support is accomplished through the use of information structures, information processes, and information technology.” (ANA Scope and Standards of Nursing Informatics Practice, 2001, pg vii)

Nursing Medical Informatics, in simple words, is the system solution making the nursing easier and accurate. On the other hand, an ideal Nursing Informatics would participate in multidisciplinary strategic planning determining the system solutions for supporting patient care, setting clinical application standards and transforming clinical practice.

Information technology, as in nursing informatics, is brought in to benefit the nursing practice and improve overall patient care system and process. An Informatic Nurse would use automated application in their routine assignments in the health care center and play crucial role in patient’s recovery.

What Courses Available for Nursing Informatics?

There are many options for nurses to turn themselves Informatics Nurses. Private and Government Institutes provide trainings to be a techno savvy and then certifies the participants. Simply Google the term and you are landed with dozens of results! While choosing the course, confirm the university first.

To earn the certificate or degree in Medical Informatics Nursing field, you got to either have a degree or diploma in Nursing from the institute preferably approved by the Government Body or you can directly apply for Nursing Informatics as specialization.  Of course, there are postgraduate certificate programs that require you to be RN or BSN. Various online and campus courses can get you Medical Nursing Informatics expertise.

The Scope for Nursing Informatics

The scope for Nursing Medical Informatics is huge. Ample of opportunities are waiting in medical world due to shortage of qualified nurses. In addition, Nursing Information System course touches most essential areas as subjects/topics in their courses that come as day-to-day challenges in medical field. Here is the list of common topics generally covered in Medical Nurse Informatics…

• Nursing Theory – it’s about information on theories applying to Information Technology like the Change Theory.
• Change management – Includes the utilization of change theory to support and develop process improvement planning
• Research Methodology – involves information on how to get on good hands on research.
• Decision Supporting System – evidence-based care for the patients.
• System Life Cycle – this topic includes knowledge of system life cycle to know its efficacy and limitations.
• Health Policy – teaches how to influence technology for health policy.
• Internet and Health –teaches about how to use Internet to enhance the knowledge and bettering the patient care.
• Database Management – provides hands on how to organize and store patient data.
• Health care informatics – an umbrella term incorporating all different areas of health care informatics such as medical, nutrition, diet and IT roles.
• Knowledge Management – teaches information on standardized jargon and terminology.

The role of Healthcare Informatics, role of Medical Informatics or the role of Information Technology in medical science –all serve same meaning. It is all about how IT helps in solving the problems in medical science. Software for medical science is becoming quite a common product on the market. Let us learn how medical software simplify the issues.

Gone are the days when you had one common answer for all problems! In olden days, each of your health ailments had been treated by general practitioner. Now, with betterment and advancement in every technical and scientific field, we have specialization at every turn. Now if you got problem in intestines, you got to consult gastroenterologist; if got a dislocated jawbone, you have Temporomandibular expert to fix the jaw line. Likewise, Medical Informatics or Healthcare Informatics is Information Technology dealing with problems in medical science domain. By all accounts, software developed for medical science is million miles away from the software developed for banking or entertainment.

Ever since the software (computers) has started encroaching in every possible field on this planet, health care has not remained aloof anymore. Today, you find a number of software tools that help in several areas of medical field such as medical management, medical diagnoses, medical treatment, medical regimen, medical records, medical judgment and what not. In fact, most of the medical instruments are run through complex software fit into it.

Need of Medical Informatics

Things go well with accuracy at the helm –and this brings different medical or health care informatics into the picture. The health care center located back of the beyond faces a lot of troubles when it the doctor is incapable to care/treatment the patient. Medical software installed at this place connecting it to the major hospital in the city where the experts are sitting plays crucial role in solving this embarrassing problem. As far as I know, in India, CDAC has installed powerful software in the state of Tamilnadu that connects one main hospital with as many as 30 centers across the state. The statistics say that visits to the main hospitals from peripheral areas had been drastically down by 70 per cent! This way, the experts sitting in main hospital could spare more time in seeing patients in the OPD.

At the outset, health care software may seem to be costly. Nevertheless, if you look at the utility it provides, in a long turn, it is beneficial for sure. The software comes with all its bag of tricks to solve the problems you face in day to day medical management. Software for general medical practice stores the data of patients and you can search any patient’s history or case in seconds.

Benefits of Healthcare Informatics

I also wrote many articles about using Online Patient Appointment Scheduler wherein the patients are allowed to login to the system and book their appointments without calling medical front office executives. In this way, overlapping of the time is less likely to happen. Also, advanced Online Doctor Appointment Scheduling System can serve as medical virtual receptionist that answers patients’ calls without any failure. In case of medical camp, this feature is found very useful.

On the market, you also come across the software that reminds the patients about their forthcoming visit to the health care center. In addition, patients can also be informed about their regimen, dietary plans or body tests to be performed timely, if any. Latest software for medical management has Google Synchronization through which, the data is sent on the web and is accessible using handheld devices such as Blackberry, Smartphone, iPhone etc. A two-way sync enables the user (the health care provider) to reschedule the appointments according to his/her plan for the day or coming week.

Who is Medical Domain Expert in Information Technology?

As we already saw the definition of domain expert, medical domain expert in IT is someone with knowledge of computer languages (software) and its implementation in health care industry.

A person, preferably a doctor, with knowledge of medical standards such as HL7, DICOM, ICD and acquaintance with computer languages such as C++, C#, HTML, XML, JAVA may be called as health domain expert in information technology.  Also, for health care domain expert in software industry (IT industry) knowledge of .net, asp.net and ORACLE (SQL) is preferred. This is because almost all the software tools deal with database –one or the other way.

Who require Health care Domain Expert or Medical Informatics Consultant?

Any software firm that develops medical software would require medical domain expert or health care informatics consultant. This helps the company to understand typical needs by the physicians, surgeons and other health care providers. On the other hand, the hospital or chain of health care centers may also hire health domain experts for buying and maintaining different health care software.

Google Search Engine are rapidly use by patients and doctors to get medical information every day. Worldwide web-based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use. Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes by using Google.

Web based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use. Google was used for 45 percent of U.S. Web searches in September, according to ComScore Networks Inc., a market researcher in Reston, Virginia. Unlike clinical decision support programs, Google, the world’s most popular Internet search engine, is easier to use and is available free of charge.

Sometime doctors face difficult diagnostic cases and obscure situation like Cushing’s syndrome  and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases. For this case Google provide more than three billion of medical articles that help the doctors to find out right diagnosis. The researchers, whose findings are published online by the British Medical Journal, suggest Google is likely to be a useful aid for conditions with unique symptoms and signs that can easily be used as search terms.

Google searches found the correct diagnosis in 15 (58 per cent) of cases. Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Hangwi Tang. A team of Australian doctors Goggled the symptoms of 26 cases for a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 15 cases, the web search came up with the right diagnosis, the paper published on the British Medical Journal website reports. While doctors carry a huge amount of medical information in their heads, they may need to seek further help if they come up against an unusual case.


The researcher from different countries of the world are research for various human diseases and diagnostic cases and when they success they publish their article in web. It will help the doctors, researcher and also patient to knowing the syndrome of disease. The researchers believe that as medical information is expanding at a speed with which doctors will never be able to keep up, It is estimated that an average doctor needs to carry two million facts in his/her memory to assist in diagnosing illnesses. But Google provide more information that will help the doctor to right diagnosis. Doctors have a very wide knowledge when it comes to diagnosing conditions but the patients would be concerned if they were using website to diagnose people.

Google, say the team, is easy to use, useful and an excellent aid in finding the correct diagnoses for conditions with unique symptoms and signs. They also add that using Google in this way was only considered reliable for health care professionals with good medical knowledge.