The nurse informaticists play a critical role in conception and development of new technologies for improved health and management. They actively participate in gathering and providing comprehensive information about new workflows within the nursing system. Additionally, they help guide new nursing technologies towards continuous process improvement. Assuming the role of nurse manager, the nurse informaticist can play a pivotal role while working on a unit that requires the implementation of a new nursing documentation system. The nurse manager can ensure that the documentation system is well accepted among the nurse practitioners and that it is highly usable by the intended users, by onboarding a nurse leader to oversee the overall system development and implementation plan while adhering to the five stages of the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
The Role of the Nurse Informaticist in Systems Development and Implementation
The nurse informaticists play a critical role in conception and development of new technologies for improved health and management. They actively participate in gathering and providing comprehensive information about new workflows within the nursing system. Additionally, they help guide new nursing technologies towards continuous process improvement. Assuming the role of nurse manager, the nurse informaticist can play a pivotal role while working on a unit that requires the implementation of a new nursing documentation system. The nurse manager can ensure that the documentation system is well accepted among the nurse practitioners and that it is highly usable by the intended users, by onboarding a nurse leader to oversee the overall system development and implementation plan while adhering to the five stages of the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Planning and Requirements Definition
The first stage in the SDLC involves planning and requirements definition for the intended system. For the nursing documentation system, the nurse informaticist can help system developers to understand the need of the end-users (Verma & Gupta, 2017). The end-users in this case are the nurse practitioners who will routinely be involved in using the system to document their activities, tasks, and medication plans. The nurse informaticist can actively accumulate and offer coherent information about the primary and secondary patient care activities that will be documented. For instance, they can contribute by identifying areas of improvement or elements of the standard operating procedures, such as medication error avoidance and evidence-based practice, which can prove useful to the software developers in developing the initial system plan.
Analysis
This is the second stage and involves analysis of the existing end-user needs and requirements. As already highlighted, the end-users include the frontline nurses. Thus, the nurse informaticist can serve the role of a communication bridge or liaison between the system developers and the frontline nurses (Darvish et al., 2014). They can passively observe the nurse practitioners and can also directly prompt the frontline nurses to highlight their key documentation needs and requirements. For instance, the nurse informaticist may communicate the human-error due to manual medication scheduling, or the inability to update patient records in a timely manner. Furthermore, the nurse informaticist can also readily analyze the planned user interface (UI) to ensure its alignment with the IT competencies of the frontline nurses. The informaticist can subsequently communicate these needs and requirements to the system developers to ensure their fulfilment.
Design of the New System
At the third stage of the SDLC, the developers focus on modeling the new documentation system. At this stage, the nurse informaticist can contribute by providing a rough template of the documentation system for nurses (Schoenbaum & Carroll, 2019). The template must benefit from the system’s proposed hardware and software capabilities to gauge optimum output for the nurse practitioners. They can ensure alignment between the cognitive competency of the documentation system and the nurse practitioners (Nagle, 2021). Besides, they identify the documentation challenges faced by nurse practitioners and have these challenges addressed by the newly designed documentation system. Additionally, they also ensure that the documentation system fulfils security and communication needs for the nurses.
Implementation
This is the stage where the system is finally customized and installed in the clinical IT infrastructure. The nurse leader or practitioner can participate at this stage by thoroughly explaining the new documentation system to the fellow nurses (Peggy, 2017). This will eliminate the complexity of the implementation phase along with acceptability-related challenges. Since nurse practitioners are likely to have a better understanding with their nurse leader, the entire process of implementation will be seamless as the leader already holds sufficient understanding of the nature of activities and operations at the clinical setting (Peggy, 2017). Additionally, the nurse leader identifies any missing details or features of the new documentation system, which allows the software developers to tweak the system as needed. The nurse leader can align the key details between people, processes, and technology, which can ensure full-scale implementation of the documentation system.
Post-implementation Support
The final stage in the SDLC model is post-implementation support. Following the implementation of the documentation system, it is important to come up with a post-implementation evaluation plan. In this regard, the nurse leader can compare the planned system requirements to the actual usability to identify any bugs, errors, or gaps that still need to be eliminated (Risling & Risling, 2020). The nurse leader identifies these gaps and reports them to the nurse manager or software development team, which gives rise to a new systems development lifecycle. Additionally, the nurse leader identifies value added features and support attributes that can be included in future iterations of the documentation system. This enables the swift completion of SDLC stages that fulfil business needs and requirements.
Conclusion
Nurse informaticists hold a valuable position within the clinical settings that require new technology integrations. They contribute on each stage of the SDLC process to inform correct and complete design and implementation of the new systems. For the case of a new documentation system, the nurse informaticist can serve as a liaison between the end-users / nurse practitioners and the software developers. They can inform software developers about the system needs, requirements, and challenges facing the frontline nurses to effectively address them.
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- Yasir Khan (Autor:in), 2019, The Role of the Nurse Informaticist in Systems Development and Implementation, München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1282298
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