Using The Data / Information / Knowledge / Wisdom Continuum

Through education and clinical experience, I have gained the knowledge, skills, and proficiency that have prepared me an expert acute care nurse. This has developed the root of my personal philosophy of informatics. This philosophy holds the exceptionality of every individual and the certainty that everyone has the ability to improve his or her knowledge if directed in the right direction. Based on this, my ambition as an informatics nurse is to use

During hospitalizations, falls are amongst the highest preventable consistent adverse events. Preventing such undesirable events, enhances patient overall experience, as well as increased trust in the health care professional team (Fragata, 2011). The importance of fall prevention lies with the many serious unfavorable health outcomes it can pose on the patient. Falls have the potential increase length of hospital stay, limit mobility, independence, but can ultimately lead to health deterioration, including death. Worldwide, falls are the second leading cause of accidental death. In addition to the life-threatening health and safety risks falls have to the patient, it also as a financial impact,

In this discussion board post, I will compare and contrast informatics and clinical informatics. Then I will give two examples of clinical informatics found in my organization that has been found to improve patient care. I will also give two examples of how my nurse manager can utilize data management in order to improve patient care. Lastly, I will discuss why President Bush mandated that all health records be in electronic form by the year 2014.

Problem: Patient falls have long been a common and serious problem in hospitals across the nation, causing

“The primary root causes of fatal falls as reported by healthcare organizations involved inadequate staff communication, incomplete orientation and training, incomplete patient assessment and reassessment, environmental issues, incomplete care planning, unavailable or delayed care provision, and inadequate organizational culture of safety.” (Joint Commission, 2007) If a client is high-fall-risk, implementing continuous observation by bringing in a sitter for the patient would be best. If there are patients that are demented or confused, it

Many of these inpatient falls can be prevented when following the proper fall prevention measures. Not only does patient safety make preventing falls a priority but the financial impact these falls have on an institution make it a priority as well.

Intervening falls can reduce the financial burdens attributed to patient falls in hospitals and other healthcare settings are among the most serious risk management issues facing the healthcare industry.

The data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) continuum is a concept of the transformation of data into wisdom through cognitive processes. DIKW was initially used to illustrate principles of information management for the designing of information systems (Davenport & Pursak, 1989)(Saltworks, 2009). DIKW models utilized by nursing such as the model by Englebart & Nelson (2002), incorporate principles of increasing complexity due to increasing interactions What is important and unique to nursing is the DIKW concepts and models also help describe the critical thinking processes that nurses use to transform knowledge into the delivery of patient care, into education and learning and

With the rapid growth in the implementation and use of electronic medical records, there is an increase in how we define the role of nurses and other team member’s (Deese & Stien, 2004). Along with providing optimal care, nurses are also responsible for interpreting and accurately documenting large amounts of information. According to, (Ericksen, 2009) nursing informatics is defined as the integration of nursing, its information, and information management with information processing and communication technology to support the health of people worldwide. In this

Hello Dr. Lane, there are several tools in place to monitor patient’s safety at the facility where I work. The Morse Fall Scale is one such tool used to prevent patients from injuring themselves due to a fall. According to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2013), the Morse Fall Scale is used to predict future fall, list risk factors and implement a plan of care for addressing these risks. The unit I work on most of our patients are placed on fall precautions. A falling star sign is placed outside of each high-risk patient’s room which communicates to others about their fall status. I like this idea because it allows other employees on the unit to be proactive in keeping the patient safe from falls. Employees intervene if the

In health care, patients’ lives are in the hands of the health care practitioners, health care organizations, insurance companies, and to some degree, even health care technology. The growth and future implications of evidence-based medicine (EBM) through improvement of technology in health care are important today, because health care practitioners and organizations want to ultimately decrease cost, improve quality of care, and increase access to health care (Glandon, Smaltz, & Slovensky, 2014, p. 28). One way to achieve these goals is through the implementation and improvement of EBM and interoperability which will enhance the efficiency of work production resulting in these positive outcomes. According to Glandon, Smaltz, and Slovensky (2014), EBM is an “information management and learning strategy that seeks to integrate clinical expertise with the best evidence available to make effective clinical decisions that will ultimately improve patient care,” (p. 6). “Interoperability is the ability of different information and communications technology systems and software applications to communicate, to exchange data accurately, effectively, and consistently, and to use information that has been exchanged,” (Iroju, Soriyan, Gambo, & Olaleke, 2013, para. 1). Without interoperability and EBM, fundamental data and information such as patient records cannot be easily shared across and within enterprises having a direct impact on the quality of care. It

Falls among hospitalized patients is a common problem that has an impact on patient safety. Approximately 35% of inpatient falls result in injury while about 5% of the falls result in serious injuries which are potentially fatal (Bouldin et al., 2013). Examples of such damages caused by falls include subdural hematomas and other traumatic brain injuries, fractures, lacerations, bruises among others (Bouldin et al., 2013). Falls are not only restricted to the elderly and frail patients who possess significant risk factors. Instead, any patient of any age can be predisposed to falls because of physiological changes rendered on their bodies by their medical conditions, procedures, medications, etc. The impacts of falls among hospitalized patients

Demographic shifts in the global population, greater levels of technological disruption due to the Internet, social media and the en masse adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs are together re-defining the healthcare informatics market. System and informatics theories have emerged as the foundational elements of healthcare informatics supported by the Data, Information. Knowledge (DIK) Model which acts as a taxonomy for these developments (Haugh, 2005). Systems and informatics theories along with the DIK Model form the ontological foundations of healthcare informatics field of research occurring today and will continue to provide a basis for further research (Braganza, 2004). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the contributions of systems and informatics, the role of the DIK Model, expert systems in nurse care and medicine, and the use of decision aids and decision support systems. All of these elements are critically important to strategic information systems plans healthcare providers put into place to serve patients while giving healthcare professionals the applications, systems and software they need to excel in their roles (Djellal, Gallouj, 2007).

According to Dr. Ken Majowski (Laureate, 2011) health care informatics has been in existence for at least the past two to three decades. Ozbolt & Saba (2008) state that “in the second half of the 20th century” the focus of nursing informatics was on the development of “a standardized language” (p. 199). In the 1970’s, informatics included “nursing care planning and documentation” (Ozbolt & Saba, 2008, p. 200). In the 1980’s, nursing informatics research and education led to the “establishment of data standards … unleashing the potential of nursing informatics to improve practice” thus giving nursing the opportunity to “translate knowledge to practice via decision support, and to create new knowledge from the data generated in nursing practice” (Ozbolt & Saba, 2008, p 201). In the 1990’s the “Nursing Terminology Summit Conferences” met “to develop concept-oriented reference terminology models for nursing” (Ozbolt & Saba, 2008, p. 203). The 2000’s proved to be a decade of additional progress with the call for “an electronic health record” for every

In the relationship of biomedical informatics and its related field, I was able to learn the diverse fields of health informatics, such as medical informatics, bioinformatics, and clinical informatics. I’ve learned that these fields are involved with technology communication system, and they have different types of functions in the health care industries. According to Shortliffe, medical informatics is the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research. As for bioinformatics, the scientific field that study how information is represented and analyzed in the biological system, such as information resulting at