Capella FPX 4045 Assessment 1

Capella FPX 4045 Assessment 1

Student Name

Capella University

NURS-FPX4045 Nursing Informatics: Managing Health Information and Technology

Prof. Name:

Date

Nursing Informatics in Health Care

CDSS should be included to strengthen patient safety. These systems help ensure more accurate diagnoses, guide doctors in selecting treatments, and assist healthcare workers with complex medical decisions (Laraichi et al., 2024). This proposal emphasizes the significance of NIs in leveraging CDSS to minimize errors, deliver timely drug alerts, and improve patient safety.

Nursing Informatics and the Nurse Informaticist

By combining nursing, computer science, and information technology, nursing informatics helps manage and share essential health data and knowledge, which improves patient safety. It utilizes technology to enhance care and enables nurses to access and interpret clinical data systems (Nashwan et al., 2025). A Nurse Informaticist (NI) is a nurse who has IT knowledge and works to ensure technology is used safely and effectively in healthcare settings. They prepare staff, oversee the use of new digital programs, and introduce methods that rely on data to help provide safer and more accurate care (American Nurses Association (ANA, 2024).

One example is Dr. Virginia Saba, who led the way in the field by developing the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) system to enhance the accuracy of patient records (Lopez et al., 2023). In hospitals, NIs are responsible for designing and implementing CDSS, ensuring they are simple to use and meet the needs of both patients and staff. They support clinical teams with education and data analysis to help reduce errors and enhance patient safety.

Nurse Informaticists and Other Health Care Organizations

Nurse Informaticists (NIs) have been hired by several healthcare organizations in the United States to help ensure patient safety. CDSS technology enables NIs to send immediate notifications when patients receive their medications. Due to the advancements in nursing informatics, the Cleveland Clinic has implemented improvements to its electronic health records and various digital tools (Cleveland Clinic, 2024). Similarly, the Mayo Clinic utilizes CDSS and informatics to treat patients with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), leveraging the system to predict their risk, enhance diagnosis, and provide individualized guidance at critical treatment steps (Mayo Clinic, 2024). They reveal that NIs are crucial in connecting healthcare technology to patient care, enabling the use of CDSS tools to prevent errors and enhance patient outcomes.

NIs join forces with physicians, nurses, and IT experts to ensure that CDSS tools assist healthcare workers in making informed, evidence-based choices, improving how illnesses are recognized, and reducing both errors and workload for everyone. NIs partner with both clinical and technology groups to tailor and add CDSS tools that are useful for clinicians and included in the EHR. If they cooperate, they can address problems, develop new features, and improve healthcare efficiency. NIs train nurses to utilize digital tools effectively, thereby enhancing patient care (ANA, 2024). 

Impact of Full Nurse Engagement in Health Care Technology

When nurses are involved in designing clinical tools like CDSS, patient safety improves, healthcare becomes more efficient, and costs are reduced. CDSS is most effective when nurses help ensure it supports the right choices and promotes better care. When clinicians take part in CDSS, the outcomes of their care become both safer and more accurate. CDSS tools provide nurses with rapid access to patient details, highlight important changes, help them avoid mistakes, and support informed choices, leading to improved patient outcomes (Laraichi et al., 2024).

Because of NIs, CDSS is used regularly in healthcare, supporting better organization, encouraging teamwork, and being easy to use by all staff. According to Zhai et al. (2022), nurses should lead the process of adopting technology to ensure it is used effectively and accepted. When nurses lead the use of CDSSs, companies can save a significant amount of money and achieve a better outcome from their investment. When CDSS was added to the EHR, vitamin D tests were performed less often, helping save $300,000 every year (Lewkowicz et al., 2020). If an NI leads CDSS projects, the system becomes safer, more efficient, and less expensive to operate. 

Opportunities and Challenges

Despite some obstacles, Nurse Informaticists (NIs) can significantly enhance the care provided to patients. Using Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) depends on NIs, which enable nurses to enhance diagnosis, adjust treatment, and assist doctors in making informed medical decisions (Laraichi et al., 2024). NIs help enhance care quality by providing access to useful data, putting CDSS into action, and using evidence when making decisions. Technology available from NIs enables nurses to access updated patient details, receive instant alerts, and rely on helpful tools to ensure treatments are accurate (ANA, 2024).

Nurses also learn a great deal from NIs and can utilize EHRs and CDSS more effectively to coordinate care. If some staff are not willing to use the tools or lack knowledge, the problem can be fixed by teaching them and holding awareness sessions. Strong security practices, which include encryption and routine checks, can address problems related to implementing systems and privacy (Shojaei et al., 2024).

NIs assemble healthcare and IT experts to assess whether new medical technologies are ready for use in clinics. They are actively involved in creating, setting up, and improving CDSS tools that are easy to use. NIs help teams apply digital technology to solve important problems, such as medical errors. Working together and utilizing technology, different experts can help patients heal more quickly, utilize resources more effectively, and provide more precise care. NIs are important for integrating technology into healthcare, which helps CDSS improve care and treatment. 

Summary of Recommendation and Justification of the Role

The Nurse Informaticist (NI) supports patient safety by integrating Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) responsibly. Studies conclude that CDSS aids providers in delivering accurate diagnoses, promotes complex clinical decisions, and enables better treatment plans, thereby increasing quality of care (Laraichi et al., 2024). The presence of a nurse navigator helps promote patient-centered care. NIs provide the ability to aid nurses in their analytical, health data input, and decision-making processes for better care (Nashwan et al., 2025).

Furthermore, NIs will ensure that the initiation of CDSS and EHR follows appropriate safety plan measures, such as confirming that staff are knowledgeable in multi-factor authentication to keep patient information safe, while ensuring compliance with HIPAA (Shojaei et al., 2024). Most importantly, NIs provide a strong return on investment (ROI) for the organization, enabling better decision-making through reduced errors and increased utilization of clinical decision support systems (CDSS). For example, CDSS will reduce the number of unnecessary tests and provide cost savings for healthcare, as well as improve quality standards (Lewkowicz et al., 2020). Overall, the NI role is crucial to enhancing patient safety and improving the delivery of care through technology.

Conclusion

Hiring a Nurse Informaticist (NI) to assist with the implementation of technologies, such as Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), will enhance clinical priorities and improve workflow efficiencies. Furthermore, CDSS aims to improve health outcomes for patients while ensuring safety and reducing risk through a decrease in the incidence of medical errors. NIs help facilitate collaboration among teams of interprofessional practitioners, enforce a strategy of leveraging digital tools with contextual meaning, and support a data-informed decision-making process. All of these have the potential to enhance the quality of care and augment the organization’s ability to deliver safe, high-quality, accurate, and reliable treatments.

References

ANA. (2024). What is nursing informatics, and why is it so important? American Nurses Association.org. https://www.nursingworld.org/content-hub/resources/nursing-resources/nursing-informatics/

Cleveland Clinic. (n.d.). Nursing informatics. Cleveland Clinic.org. https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/nursing/nursing-informatics

Laraichi, O., Daim, T., Alzahrani, S., Hogaboam, L., Bolatan, G. I., & Moughari, M. M. (2024). Technology readiness assessment: Case of clinical decision support systems in healthcare. Technology in Society, 79, 102736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2024.102736

Lewkowicz, D., Wohlbrandt, A., & Boettinger, E. (2020). Economic Impact of Clinical Decision Support Interventions Based on Electronic Health Records. BioMed Central Health Services Research, 20(1), 871. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05688-3

Capella FPX 4045 Assessment 1

Lopez, K. D., Langford, L. H., Kennedy, R., McCormick, K., Delaney, C. W., Alexander, G., Englebright, J., Carroll, W. M., & Monsen, K. A. (2023). Future advancement of health care through standardized nursing terminologies: Reflections from a Friends of the National Library of Medicine workshop honoring Virginia K. Saba. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 30(11), 1878–1884. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocad156

Mayo Clinic. (2024). Clinical decision support systems for personalized management of patients with acute kidney injury. Mayoclinic.org; https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/pulmonary-medicine/news/clinical-decision-support-systems-for-personalized-management-of-patients-with-acute-kidney-injury/mac-20524049

Nashwan, A. J., Cabrega, J. A., Othman, M. I., Khedr, M. A., Osman, Y. M., Ashry, A. M. E., Naif, R., & Mousa, A. A. (2025). The evolving role of nursing informatics in the era of artificial intelligence. International Nursing Review, 72(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.13084

Shojaei, P., Gjorgievska, V. E., & Chow, Y.-W. (2024). Security and privacy of technologies in health information systems: A systematic literature review. Computers, 13(2), 41–41. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers13020041

Zhai, Y., Yu, Z., Zhang, Q., Qin, W., Yang, C., & Zhang, Y. (2022). Transition to a new nursing information system embedded with clinical decision support: A mixed-method study using the HOT-fit framework. BioMed Central Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 22(1), 310. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-02041-y