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General principles of Nursing Informatics
• Verbalize the importance of health information systems with clinical practice.
• Have knowledge of types and clinical and administrative uses of health information systems.
• Ensure confidentiality of protected patient health information.
• Assure access control in the use of health information systems.
• Informatics: Science and art of turning data into info.
• Nursing Informatics ANS: The specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information and
analytical sciences to identify, define, manage, and communicate data, information, knowledge, and
wisdom in nursing practice.
o Nursing Informatics supports nurses, consumers, patients, the inter-professional healthcare team,
and all other stakeholders in their decision making in all roles and settings to achieve desired
outcomes.
o 2 Levels NI practice: generalists and informatics-nurse specialists.
Knowledge
• Awareness and understanding of a set of information and ways that information can be made useful to
support specific task or arrive at a decision
• Information that’s synthesized so that relationships are identified and formalized.
• Processed information that helps to clarify or explain some portion in our environment or world that we
can use a as basis for action or upon which we can act.
• Often affected by assumptions and central theories of a scientific discipline and is derived by discovering
patterns of relationships between different clusters of information.
• Answers questions of “why” and “how”
• Data – uninterpreted items, often referred to as data elements. An example might be a person’s weight.
Without additional data elements such as height, age, overall well-being it would be impossible to
interpret the significance of an individual number.
• Information – a group of data elements that have been organized and processed so that one can
interpret the significance of the data elements.
o For example, height, weight, age, and gender are data elements that can be used to calculate the
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BMI. The BMI can be used to determine if the individual is underweight, overweight, normal
weight or obese.
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• Knowledge - is built on a formalization of the relationships and interrelationships between data and
information. A knowledge base makes it possible to understand that an individual may have a calculated
BMI that is over 30 and not be obese.
• At this time, several automated decision support systems included a knowledge base and a set of rules for
applying the knowledge base in a specific situation.
o For example, the knowledge base may include the following information. A fever or elevated
temperature often begins with a chill. At the beginning of the chill the patient’s temperature may
be normal or even sub-normal but in 30 minutes it is likely the patient will have spiked a temp. A
rule might read: if a patient complains of chills, then take the patient’s temperature and repeat in
30 minutes.
Wisdom
• Appropriate use of data, information, and knowledge in making decisions and implementing nursing
actions.
• Guides the nurse in recognizing the situation at hand based on patients’ values, nurse’s experience, and
healthcare knowledge.
• Implies a form of ethics, or knowing why certain things or procedures should or should not be
implemented in healthcare practice.
• Includes the ability to integrate data, information, and knowledge with professional values when
managing specific human problems.
• The use of knowledge and experience to heighten common sense and insight so as to exercise sound
judgment in practical matters.
• Thought to be the highest form of common sense, resulting from accumulated knowledge.
• Ability to apply viable and valuable knowledge, experience, understanding, and insight while being
prudent and sensible.
• Appropriate use of knowledge to solve human problems.
Scientific Underpinning
• The scientific underpinnings of practice provide the basis of knowledge for advanced nursing practice.
• These scientific underpinnings include sciences such as biology, physiology, psychology, ethics, and
nursing.
• The sciences underpinning nursing informatics: Nursing science, information science, and computer
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science
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