Your day-to-day job in perioperative nursing has become a quest to navigate mountains of documentation. Your surgical procedures are either running behind or non-existent. You can’t remember the last time you had a clear conversation with a surgical patient before the anesthesia kicked in. You’re stressed, tired, and headed for nursing burnout.

This scenario is not uncommon in the United States. In June 2022, AORN surveyed its members and some nonmembers and learned that 60% of those surveyed considered burnout as a factor contributing to workplace dissatisfaction. In fact, burnout ranked the third highest when it comes to perioperative nursing discontent (behind salary and workplace culture woes).

How can a staff informatics nurse help?

A staff informatics nurse can harness your healthcare facility’s technology and make it work for you, adapting it as the team’s needs grow and change. Smaller teams often turn to informatics consultants to help them establish or improve electronic health records (EHR) functions. But as caseloads and technology use increase, EHR optimization is required to prevent workplace burdens from snowballing: too much documentation, scheduling and procedure preference workflow issues, limited access to current evidence-based practices, and others. It may become necessary to rely on an informatics nurse full-time.

Informatics nurses can help in three key ways:

1. Data: Assess the technology needs of a healthcare team, and adapt EHRs to streamline workflows
2. Systems: Develop baselines and design new / modified applications and best practices to improve interoperability and access to patient-care information
3. People: Liaise between stakeholders (leadership, IT, nursing, administrative, etc.) to ensure that EHR systems provide holistic benefits

A lot of that stress nurses endure – the stress that leads to burnout – can be alleviated by the adaptations and improvements an informatics nurse provides.

How do you know when it’s time to hire a staff informatics nurse?

It’s time your healthcare facility needs a full-time informatics team member when you find that technology is no longer working for you. Nurses train to care for patients, not to understand the inner workings of an EHR.

But a BSN or MSN informatics nurse is trained in both patient care AND information technology. He or she is ready to speak the language of tech whilst also understanding the challenges faced by nurses in the field.