HIMSS Nursing Informatics Committee 2023 Year End Summary

The purpose of the HIMSS Nursing Informatics (NI) Committee is to be a coalition of thought leaders who provide domain expertise, leadership, and guidance to the global health ecosystem for the entire HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community. ​ We strive to share and expand knowledge, strengthen the NI community and collaborate with the greater healthcare community.  To accomplish this, each year the NI committee selects a cross section of talented leaders from the nursing informatics community to come together and prioritize areas of focus for the committee.  Members of the committee, often in collaboration with other committees or task forces within the larger HIMSS community, then produce resources related to these topics.

This year the nursing leaders of the NI committee focused on 5 areas:

1. The value of nursing informatics: Highlighting nursing informatics’ unique combination of clinical and technical skills, the committee was able to demonstrate informatics contributions to healthcare.  The NI committee felt it was imperative to showcase how nursing informatics is able to harness technology, data, and innovative solutions to help with the nursing workforce issue of today.  In collaboration with the HIMSS physician committee, a white paper, The Value of Clinical Informatics was generated that outlines specific ways informatics add effectiveness and efficiency to healthcare organizations, how to increase engagement of informatics leaders to impact strategic change, and how to capture and share those contributions to recognize the full value, including the financial impact.  In addition, the resource article, Computing the Value of Nursing Informatics, further provides for practical ways to clearly demonstrate the return on investment directly related to informatics work.  In addition, experts were interviewed in the article, Nurses Month Industry Perspectives: Nurse Informaticists Make a Difference, to reveal how nurse informaticists are leveraging technology innovations to improve healthcare.  
2. Data and Analytics:  The committee also focused on data and analytics as a way to improve outcomes as well as a way to calculate the impact of nursing care to drive those outcomes.  The webinar, Nurses Count: Classifying Nursing Value with Informatics Data discusses how nursing informatics can help to capture data on the work nurses do to quantify their value and improve productivity.  The committee also played a role in collecting valuable data by surveying the community to determine the reasons for clinical documentation as a first step to understanding the “why” which will lead to insights on the “how” to make impactful decreases to this growing burden.  Committee members also documented levels of competency for nursing with data and analytics as a way for leaders to navigate how to advances nurse in this essential competency area.  Data literacy is critical in our continued efforts to improve care effectiveness and efficiency with tools such as, predictive analytics and large language models which rely on precise data for accurate and meaningful results.
3. Nursing workforce and engagement:  In interviews of leaders of the NI community,  the article, Future of Nursing: Nursing Informatics Industry Perspectives, discussed nursing workforce challenges and how nursing informatics can help overcome some of these challenges.  Committee members also participated on HIMSS TV interviews where they discussed specific areas of focus to help with workforce challenges like using predictive analytics for clinical decision support, telehealth and mobile applications, and documentation efficiency efforts (HIMSS TV: Predictive Modeling, HIMSS TV: Documentation burden, HIMSS TV: Telehealth and Mobile apps).
   
   The committee also explored the state of the nursing informatics workforce through their analysis of the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Workforce Survey (Insights from the 2022 HIMSS Nursing Informatics Workforce Survey).   This webinar on the nursing informatics survey shows how this role continues to evolve by providing data on NI functions, roles, education, and certifications.  In addition, as a way to provide an example of how important wellness is to keeping a workforce engaged, during the Nursing Informatics forum of HIMSS23 we purposefully inserted wellness breaks throughout the day such as stretching and mindfulness.  A survey after the event found that these breaks were very well received. Link to article.
4. Health Equity:  With a growing understanding of how vital data on social determinants of health (SDOH) can be to improve health equity, the committee published a 5-part blog series on SDOH (Nursing Impact on SDOH).  The series helps explain nursing’s role, the regulatory imperative, the community connection and the impact on patients and their health outcomes.  It also demonstrates nursing informatics expertise in establishing an effective SDOH program within healthcare organizations.
5. Education and competency:  For this topic, we focused on both the competency and growth potential of nursing informaticists but also nursing at large.  With the rapidly changing digital landscape and reliance on data, continued education opportunities should be encouraged.  In the webinar, Are Nurses Able to Lead in the Digital Health Evolution?  Developing an Informatics Competent and Capable Nursing Workforce, speakers discussed the gaps in the current workforce and the novice to expert trajectory related to informatics skills within the nursing.  For insight into ways to address those gaps, the second webinar, Part 2: Developing Informatics Competent Nursing Faculty and Students, was presented. The importance of continuing education to equip nurses with the skills needed in the fast-paced digital age of healthcare was then discussed in the third webinar of the series, Part 3:  Transforming Digital Health through Nursing Education.   In addition, experts in the panel Empowering Early Careerists: Navigating the Path to Success in Nursing Informatics, shared valuable advice and tips for success in nursing informatics.

One more change initiated by this year’s committee that will see further development next year and beyond is a comprehensive Nursing Informatics resource page on the HIMSS website.  The page will help with everything from defining nursing informatics roles to providing links to resources for topics important to the industry and connections to HIMSS committees and other aligned professional organizations.  We hope that this page will become a key resource for nursing informatics for years to come!

Nursing Informatics Committee members:

• Susan Adams, RN BSN MSN RAC-CT CPHIMS, EMR Clinical Systems Director, Life Care Services LLC
• Chad B Carroll, DNP, RN-BC, Health Informaticist, Northwestern Medicine
• Donald Cox MHA, BSN, RN-C, CPHIMS, Principal Business Consultant, symplr
• Charity Darnell, MSN, RN, VP, Chief Clinical Informatics Officer, Cook Children’s Health Care System
• Jill Evans, MSN, RN, RN-BC, ACNO - Clinical Informatics, The MetroHealth System
• Craig J.Garst II, CPHIMS, MSN, RN-BC, Director, Advanced Analytics, Advocate Health
• Olga Kagan, PhD, RN, CIMI, FHIMSS, FAAAAI NYAM Fellow, Consortium Faculty & Associate Adjunct Professor, CUNY School of Professional Studies
• Michelle M Machon, DNP, MSN, RN, CPHIMS, CENP, CNO, Nursing Professional Development, EBP and Informatics, Burjeel Holdings
• Sean Michaels, DNP, MBA-HCA, MSN, RN, CHCIO, CDH-E, CPHIMS, AVP, IT Project Management, Enterprise Architecture, & Technology Business Management, Orlando Health
• Kelly Larrabee-Robke DNP, MBA, MS, RN, Associate Vice President and Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Ascension
• Anna Schoenbaum, DNP, MS, RN, NI-BC, FHIMSS ,Vice President Applications & Digital Health, Penn Medicine
• Robert Steele, BSN, CPC, SHIMSS, Senior Director, Clinical Applications, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
• Marisa L. Wilson DNSc, MHSc, RN-BC, CPHIMS, FIAHSI, FAMIA, FAAN, Associate Professor, Director, Nursing Health Systems, Leadership Pathway, Specialty Track Coordinator, MSN Nursing Informatics UAB School of Nursing | The University of Alabama at Birmingham