Nursing Informatics

1. Discuss at least three (3) policies, crucial to the implementation of health care/ nursing
informatics
Workplace health and safety policies
With patients at the heart of your health-related policies, it makes sense then to include
a variety of policies that cover your biggest asset – namely, employees.
As the number one resource of any healthcare facility, employees need (and deserve)
policies that look out for their health and safety on the job. This holds especially true
because healthcare professionals face much greater health risks compared to most
other industry professions.
Information security policy
The issue of security is becoming an increasingly important one for healthcare facilities
of all sizes. Even for smaller organizations that lack a dedicated security team, Whether
your facility maintains a security team or not, your health-related policies should clearly
explain that security, like compliance, is everyone’s responsibility.
You need to equip employees at every level with the right information and procedures
so they can handle security-related situations that might arise.
Data privacy and IT security
Increasingly, data privacy and IT security are connected in terms of hospital policies and
procedures. The more technology you incorporate into your facilities, the more risks you
face for data leaks or privacy breaches.
Primarily, human error falls at the crux of these breaches. That is why it is crucially
important to put in writing these security and privacy policies. They can help your facility
avoid a costly error.
Crucial to the implementation of health care/ nursing informatics
1. Creating a patient health record that can be accessed by many staff members
that are caring for the patient.
2. Improving patient safety by reducing errors from illegible handwriting.
3. Preventing the staff from dispensing medications to which the patient is allergic.
4. Granting access to needed information regarding diseases, medications, and
procedures.
5. Improving the ability to analyze data from the health records that increases staff
performance.

2. 6. Improving access to reports from medical laboratories, physical therapy
sessions, respiratory therapy sessions, nurses, physicians and others on the
healthcare team and helping give a more complete picture of the care and
condition of the patients.
7. Requiring less paper and allowing more storage of patient and administrative
information. Let's face it, buildings run out of room quickly as medical records
and other paper take up large amounts of space.
Healthcare informatics can change the delivery of care and the evaluation of care in a
way that improves the patient experience and improves the workflow of the staff. Before
the implementation begins, there must be a system-wide planning initiative for success.
Workplace health programs are implemented to improve the health of individual
employees and of the overall organization.
It may be more prudent to focus on one or two policies and programs at first and build
on early successes, rather than implement several interventions with insufficient
resources. Also, many effective interventions such as health-related policy changes
exist that are low-cost, which is especially important for small-and-medium-sized
companies that may not have extensive resources to dedicate to employee health.
Effective implementation is critical to the success of health policies and legislation. Even
when a policy or piece of legislation is of a high-quality, incomplete implementation may
lead to policy failure, resulting in unintended population health consequences and
ineffective uses of public resources.