Informatics

Unlocking Healthcare's Future: The Invaluable Role of Clinical Informatics

By Lisa Stephenson, MSN, RN-BC; Rakhal M. Reddy, MD, MS, FACHE, FAMIA; Anna E. Schoenbaum, DNP, MS RN, NI-BC, FHIMSS; Deepti Pandita, MD, FACP, FAMIA; Jill Evans, MSN, RN, RN-BC; Roosevelt De Los Santos MD, MBA, MS (Pop. Health), CPE, FAAP, ABPM-CI, CPPS, FACHE; Danny Lee, MD, FACP

Introduction

The collaborative nature of healthcare underscores the pivotal role of nurse and physician informaticists in ensuring effective teamwork for the betterment of patient outcomes. Informaticists recognize the importance of data and technology in achieving quality improvement in healthcare, emphasizing the need for their practical application to avoid adding to clinician frustration and burden.

The HIMSS Clinical Informatics Communities white paper, published in 2022, outlines specific clinical informatics roles and highlights the collaboration between nurse and physician informaticists and how their partnership in practice impacts the healthcare ecosystem by balancing the needs of all clinical functions for the ultimate benefit of the patient. In this paper, the Clinical Informatics Communities took a deeper dive into the value this collaboration, specifically the role of informaticists, can bring within healthcare organizations and the advancement of the broader healthcare industry.

Medicine is a team sport. Nurse and Physician informaticists play on this team and understand how patient outcomes depend on this team effectively working together. With this experience as their foundation, they build on their skills by learning how data and technology can become invaluable tools in the constant drive for quality improvement. However, it's only when these tools are effectively applied that they can lead to improved outcomes versus increased frustration and burden on clinicians. This is where informatics excels. Informaticists understand end-to-end workflows and can assist in ensuring the technology meets the needs to support those workflows and support the best clinical outcomes.

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