Information technology (IT) has
great impact on human lives. It has made people life easier. Technology made it
possible to extract updated information on our fingertips anytime, anywhere. In
today’s world IT become an essential part of every industry whether it is
commercial or services industry. In the services industry, health care (nursing)
is also being impacted by technological changes. In today's Information Age,
nurses are expected to keep pace with the rapidly advancing technology and
Information and Communication technology becomes an integral part of health-care
practice. Patients are the customers of health care facility; it is the
responsibility of health care professionals to satisfy their needs and that can
only be attained by providing quality care to them. Quality care can be provided
by giving proper health education to the patients and by maintaining privacy,
confidentiality, and safety of the patients. IT is one way which gives the
opportunity to health care professionals especially nurses to provide quality
and safe care to their patients. As nurses spend more time with the patients
than other health care professionals so IT helps them in achieving this goal.
Use of IT in health care setting helps nurses in providing safe care to their
patients. Patient safety is improved by reducing medication error, by sharing
health information among health care professional and by updating recent
knowledge about different diseases.
Patient safety is foremost in nursing profession and it is enhanced by reducing
medication error and that become possible through IT. Institute of Medicine has
designed a report in 2000 which estimates that 7,391 deaths resulted from
medication errors each year in United States and according to report medication
errors occur in nearly 1 of every 5 doses given to patients in the typical
hospital. In order to reduce the death rate, health care professionals should
lessen the incident of medication error. In this way they will be able to
provide safe and quality care to their patients. IT plays an important role in
reducing medication error. As the medication orders are computerized, no one can
change the physician’s order and the orders are clearly written so there are
less chances of medication error. Whereas, in past when there was no IT
medication orders were written manually. There were high chances of incidence of
medication error because sometimes hand writing was not understandable to the
nurses. IT has solved this problem by decreasing the incidences of medication
error.
Safe and quality care is also provided by sharing health information of the
patient among health care professionals. Health information is shared easily
among all health care providers with the help of IT. The sharing of information
within health care professionals i.e. doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians,
pharmacists, dieticians are important to provide continuous care to the patients
and alll the health records of the patient are available in computer with an
easy access. For example, if there is an abnormality in lab reports, through IT
this information is easily conveyed to the doctors and nurses and treatment will
be carried out accordingly. Besides that, pharmacists can suggest the doctors to
adjust the doses of medication. In addition, dietician can also give their
suggestions about the preferred diet accordingly. Another example is that, if
patient is shifted from one department to another, the health care professionals
of that department will get complete information about the patient and it helps
in providing continuous and safe care to the patient.
Patients will also receive safe and quality care if nurses are well equipped
with recent and relevant information about diseases. IT helps nurses in updating
the knowledge regarding different diseases and their treatments by reading
recent online web and journal articles. As medication error put patient and
nurses in trouble, knowledge error can also create problem to patient as well as
to nurses. For this reason, nurses should keep themselves updated with the
updated information about health and health issues. Nurses play an important
role in caring and educating patient as well as their families so it is
essential for nurses to have an appropriate and in depth knowledge about health
and diseases. As knowledge works in this technological age, it is essential that
nurses have access to the latest information at their fingertips. As a human
being, it is difficult to remember each and everything so IT enabled, nurses to
do difficult task in an easy manner. IT provides an opportunity to search
different internet websites for health and health issues within minutes.
Moreover, nurses increases and updates their knowledge by reading recent online
articles from these websites anytime anywhere. In this way, nurses will develop
their professional growth. In addition, intranet can be developed within the
organization to have an easy access to the policies, protocols and procedures.
Knowledge can be updated by reading books and journal articles. Policies,
protocols and procedures can be retrieved through files but nowadays people are
so fond of computer technology that they want all the things to be done with the
help of this technology. They prefer searching through internet rather reading
books and files because it saves time as well as energy.
In summary, IT has a great impact on nursing and health care setting. It gives a
way to nurses to provide safe and quality care to the patient in a complex
clinical environment. The Institute of Medicine's "Crossing the Quality Chasm"
report (2003) calls for the infusion of information technology into today's
healthcare curricula, reasoning that IT tools are essential to safe,
high-quality care in today's complex clinical environments. IT helps nurses in
improving safety of the patient by reducing medication error, by sharing health
information among health care professionals and by updating knowledge about
different diseases and their treatment. Keeping in mind the uses of IT, it is
suggested that IT should be introduced in all health care setting to improve
patient safety and provide quality care to them. In addition, nurses should be
trained about the correct use of IT. If nurses don’t know how to operate the
system, it would be difficult for them to fulfill their responsibility. So it is
important for the management of the health care setting to arrange short course
of IT for their employees. Furthermore, IT course should be introduced in
nursing curriculum.