Data That Matters: What an Informatics Nurse Can Do for You

Clinical knowledge and data-driven insight unlock invaluable efficiencies.

ASCs face a broad range of challenges, including staffing, regulatory compliance, technology integration, financial challenges, patient volume management and much more.

You’re certainly aware of all these challenges and handling them as well as you can. What you might not know is that a nurse informaticist can help with all of them – particularly the heavy lifting that comes with truly leveraging all of the internal and external data you generate and receive to make better, more informed decisions about your operations.

What is a nurse informaticist?

As you might guess by the name, a nurse informaticist aligns patient care with information technology (IT). A nurse informaticist is an expert in the design, development, implementation and optimization of electronic health records (EHR) and other health information systems. Because of their dual perspective, they often act as a liaison between clinical and technical staff to get everyone on the same page about how care is provided at the bedside and best captured by electronic documentation.

In essence, a nurse informaticist is capable of helping to streamline an ASC’s operations while optimizing its outcomes. Not only do they bridge the gap between clinical workflows and IT, they ensure that technology serves as a tool rather than an obstacle to enhance the delivery of high-quality patient care.

Implementing a thoughtful perioperative nursing informatics strategy can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your ASC.

Professional problem solvers

Let’s take another look at some of the challenges we mentioned earlier, and how a nurse informaticist can help you address them.

• Staffing. Perioperative staffing shortages negatively impact your current teams through increased workloads that can increase stress and burnout while decreasing morale, which in turn can lead to higher turnover rates and increased costs. In today’s staffing environment, you’ll regularly find nurses with only one to three years of practice serving as educators and/or managers because they may literally be the most senior on their unit and are seen as the leader by default.

A nurse informaticist can leverage technology to stabilize these staffing issues. They can help you use your EHR to its full potential by integrating facility policy, protocol and education into an electronic form at the point of care. They can provide a standardized nomenclature for documentation that meets national standards and recommendations. By reducing variability of charting practices among staff, they can ensure that no matter who is working a case or how tired or inexperienced they may be, they’re working within a shared structure with set parameters.

• Patient volume management. Staffing shortages significantly impact patient care by increasing wait times, reducing the time nurses can spend with their patients, and raising the potential for clinical errors.

A nurse informaticist can account for these operational stressors by helping to optimize scheduling. They can implement and maintain a standardized procedure list. They can preserve the uniqueness of procedures while minimizing the impact on preference card management, predictive analytics and communication, and ensure that training and support for volume management practices are thoroughly completed. By making scheduling and documentation practices more efficient, a nurse informaticist can enhance capacity management and improve patient care.

• Technology integration and adaption. Tight staffing situations make it more difficult to safely and effectively roll out new technologies for clinical staff, especially those involving the EHR. A nurse informaticist who is well-versed in the function and constraints of an ASC’s existing infrastructure can better ensure that adequate and efficient integration can be achieved from the introduced product. They can ensure much smoother adoption of new systems and technologies.

• Mergers and acquisitions. When facilities consolidate, they often bring together multiple EHR systems, making it challenging to standardize data capture. System inefficiencies can go unnoticed and data may be misinterpreted. A nurse informaticist can help ensure data standardization for the newly combined entity by capturing appropriate data from each institution and generating meaningful reports that enhance efficiencies.

• Regulatory compliance. Navigating complex regulations requires meticulous documentation that’s difficult to maintain without robust systems. Through maintaining a knowledge of current documentation requirements, a nurse informaticist can support compliance by regularly updating documentation to ensure adherence to regulatory standards.

A nurse informaticist is capable of helping to streamline an ASC’s operations while optimizing its outcomes.

• Financial pressures. ASCs must optimize resources and billing accuracy while managing tight budgets and regulations. A nurse informaticist can help you maintain financial stability by enhancing and optimizing workflows and resources, improving billing and coding accuracy, facilitating data-based decisions, ensuring regulatory compliance, and training and supporting a more efficient workforce.

First steps

If your ASC has an EHR, uses equipment with dedicated software platforms, requires documentation training and support for staff, or is experiencing workflow and documentation inefficiencies, a nurse informaticist’s unique perspective and skillset can help with all of it.

A long-term strategic approach to nursing informatics can make your ASC more resilient and competitive by driving sustained operational and clinical improvements, including enhanced workflow efficiency and refinement, more informed data-driven decision making and ongoing adaptation to modern technologies and regulations.

A nurse informaticist can pinpoint previously hidden areas for improvement by evaluating your ASC’s current systems, identifying your training needs and assessing your workflow inefficiencies. Should your ASC hire a full-time or part-time nurse informaticist, or contract one? Should you consult an informatics expert like my organization, AORN Syntegrity? After reading this article and taking an honest look at your operations and budget, you’ll have a clearer answer.

Nursing informatics can help modernize your ASC. Overwhelmed by the concept? Not sure where to start? Feel free to schedule a 15-minute call with AORN Syntegrity via this link: osmag.net/syntegrity.

We can help you get the wheels in motion. OSM