Describe the benefits that information management and electronic information systems brings to delivery of informed, safe, and quality healthcare.
Discuss how healthcare informatics might be integrated into the pre-licensure nursing curriculum.
Provide two examples of teaching strategies utilizing the following:
Electronic health record as a learning tool
A teaching strategy from the QSEN project specifying a specific student assignment relevant to nursing informatics.
Conclude your discussion with a well-developed reflection on the significance of healthcare informatics to 21st century nursing education.

In response to the Institution of Medicine call to improve the quality of healthcare the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative was started. The QSEN initiative consisted of the development of quality and safety competencies that serve as a resource for nursing faculty to integrate contemporary quality and safety content into nursing education.
Nurses are on the front line of patient safety. It is important for the nursing profession to realize all the benefits healthcare informatics can offer to ease their jobs and improve patient safety.
Introducing health care informatics into the nursing curriculum will prepare the student for new and innovative technologies on the horizon in the healthcare community. Safety benefits are consistent with the use electronic health record.
If electronic medical records are being used by the nurse, the physician is using them as well. Implementing EMR has solved the challenged of illegible handwriting that has led to increase medical errors. Another benefit of the electronic medical record is that it often works in conjunction with another valuable technology tool: electronic medication administration records, which provide an electronic recording of time and date of medication administration, which can also be tied to barcode technology.
This helps reduce medication error and also alerts the provider if a drug-to-drug interaction is occurring, if a drug-to-food interaction is possible, or if the drug dosage is right for a child of a certain weight.
Another nursing benefit of electronic medical records is the clinical component, which allows nurses to document clinical care. A nurse can enter a patient’s health complaints and the system is able to alert her to the patient’s risk of falls or remind her to ask further questions about the patient’s symptoms.
Perhaps the most useful element of electronic medical records for nurses is their capacity to possess every bit of information about a patient in one centralized place. They can alert nurses to a patient’s medication allergies and medical history without the patient having to remember. The ultimate goal of electronic medical records, is that a patient will be able to go to a new facility either across the country or down the street from his primary care facility, and his records will travel electronically with him, allowing the provider instant access to his information.
Integrating healthcare informatics in the pre-licensure curriculum will hopefully now give them more time to take care of patients and educate them instead of calling around and looking for their information.”
References
Brooks, C. L., & Erickson, L. K. (2012). What is the solution for clinical nurse educators and the electronic medical record?.Teaching And Learning In Nursing, 7129-132. doi:10.1016/j.teln.2012.06.003
Lucas, L. (2010). Featured Article: Partnering to Enhance the Nursing Curriculum: Electronic Medical Record Accessibility. Clinical Simulation In Nursing, 6e97-e102. doi:10.1016/j.ecns.2009.07.006