It’s one of the first things I routinely ask any group of health IT professionals: “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been asked by a nurse to change a technology, such as an electronic health record, only to be told after you completed your hard work that the solution doesn’t work as expected.”
Invariably, everyone’s hand will go up. Sadly, that scenario plays out far too often — and it’s a lose-lose situation for all parties.
A fuzzy start is often the culprit. Without a clear and accurate identification of needs, definitions and expectations agreed upon by both parties, no one is satisfied. The disconnect can also waste time and money and delay effective care.
How does this happen? It starts with the fact that health IT teams and nurses speak different languages, and both are complex.
For example, one group may refer to a cell as a battery that creates electrical energy; the other is likely to view it as the basic structural unit of a living organism. Similarly, each party may have its own views of a medical device’s capacities or shortcomings during various stages of the patient journey.
Nursing is the nation’s largest healthcare profession, so continued efforts to break down silos with IT support is essential. Here’s how to get started.
1. Understand Your Differences and Pivot Accordingly
Many health IT professionals come from the business world, where they’re probably used to working on financial, human resources, supply chain and other business-related applications — not clinical ones.
As such, they may bring tools and solutions that don’t work well with healthcare delivery.
More than 50 percent of a nurse’s workflow is cognitive in nature. They’re continually collecting and analyzing data, making individualized patient decisions and pivoting as new data is generated. Nurses also identify and evaluate patient goals, often for multiple cases at once, in concert with other healthcare professionals.
READ MORE: Find out how virtual training is set to change nursing education.
Tools such as business process mapping or swim lane diagrams, then, may not be appropriate. To understand how nurses interact with technology, cognitive task analyses can provide more insightful results.
2. Get to Know Nurses’ Work — up Close and in Person
One technique to better understand nursing practice is to experience it firsthand. Try having your IT professionals shadow nurses for a full shift — keeping in mind that nurses practice differently depending on the specialty, patient acuity and other factors.
Still, it is important to appreciate nurses’ heavy cognitive workflow in all settings. IT staff must ask questions to uncover what nurses are thinking about: What data do they collect and analyze in their minds? What decisions are they making?
Similarly, nurses should be invited to participate in health IT meetings to listen, learn and share insights. Ideally, these should be expert informatics nurses who are educated and experienced in bridging the gap between nursing practice and technology teams to achieve desired outcomes.
Such experience is invaluable. A recent survey by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society found that the top barrier to success in technology used by nurses is the disharmony between IT and nursing technology priorities.
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Why Nurses are Key to a Strong Health IT Strategy - HealthTech Magazine
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