What is Nursing Information System?
It refers to the application of computer science and information science to manage operations involved in the nursing profession.
It has been revealed from various studies that nurses spend only about 15% of their time in direct patient care, while more than 50% of their time in maintaining and managing their patient data.
Here are some of the reasons why information systems are helpful to the nursing discipline are as follows.
Its Advantages
It helps improved nurses’ documentation…
Proper clinical documentation is very significant in every health care system, and without NIS providing an easy way to record all the necessary data, in a systematic and uniform way, and then it would be difficult for the institution and staff that would affect patient care and services. Data may include from the drugs to be administered and their dosage and time; schedule of medical tests and their results to relevant vital parameters of the patient like daily records of body temperature, blood pressure, and among others. NIS helps reduce the need for redundant paperwork, as well as enables maintaining patient history that can be easily accessed whenever required.
image credit to : http://blog.himss.org/
It helps in overall better staff management…
Having Nursing Information System helps provides an efficient way to handle administrative activities such as workload management, maintaining staff records, as well as scheduling shifts, among others. It also helpful for nurse administrators in assessing staffing requirements, as well as financial management through budgeting and monitoring of expenses.
It helps in having an efficient decision-making…
There are features of NIS which enable information management and decision-making through active and passive systems. Passive systems are able to organize and format the data according to preset parameters, and provide parameter-specific information, as and when required. Active systems on the other hand, are a step advanced and suggest diagnoses on the basis of predefined criteria applied to the patient information.
It is a way to enhance synchronization
In nursing, patient data generated in all units is always essential and significant for the decision-making in any unit of a medical facility. This can be better achieved through the integration of NIS with other clinical systems, which enables fast and easy access of the documented information to all the appropriate units.
