History of Nursing Informatics:
Computers in the 1950s:
What happened in the 1970s:
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s:
2000 and forward:
The purpose behind NI:
McGonigle and Mastrian advises that back in 2008, the American Nurses Association (ANA) updated their Scope and Standards of Nursing Informatics Practice, where they advised that " The goal of NI is to improve the health of populations, communities, families and individuals by optimizing information management and communication" (p.124).
- McGonigle and Mastrian (2012) advise that "Computers, in this era, were typically used in the business offices to track financial aspects of health care" (p.124).
What happened in the 1970s:
- The profession of nursing started to become involved in the design, purchasing and implementation of electronic health information systems (EHIS) as they were discovering how important computers were going to be for nursing, and healthcare, in general (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012).
- Healthcare organizations primarily invested in the acquisition of information management tools to support business processes such as financial information management, health records, workload measurement and human resource management (Nagel, 2008).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s:
- Clinical departmental systems (e.g., laboratory, diagnostic imaging and pharmacy) became the focus of clinical IT spending within many acute care organizations (Nagel, 2008).
- "Medical informatics and NI specialties emerged. The personal computer was introducted, which allowed for flexibility in how these clinical systems were used. It also brought to everyone's attention that not just NISs, but all healthcare personnel, need to know about these systems" (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012, p.124).
- These investments were often accompanied by the acquisition of the supporting systems architecture for distributed access and application integration (Nagel, 2008).
2000 and forward:
- "The post-2000 era saw an unprecedented explosion in the number of sophistication of both computer hardware and software. Electronic patient records became an integral part of clinical information systems" (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012, p.124).
An increasing number of healthcare organizations and community-based providers began to acquire software and technology solutions to wholly support the process of direct clinical care (Nagel, 2008).
- Nurses were automatically chosen to bridge the gap between technology and patient care, where higher education was being sought as advised by Ericksen (2009), who advises that “This…is reflected in the 2007 HIMSS Nursing Informatics Survey, in which nearly one-fifth of all participants possessed either a master’s or doctorate degree, up from 11% in 2004” (p.35).
- Graves and Corcoran state that " The task of nursing informatics is to study the structuring and processing of nursing information to arrive at clinical decisions and to build systems to support and or automate that processing. To the extent that human processing of data, information and knowledge can be modeled, these processes can be represented in computer systems and the computer system programmed to mimic the process. When processing can be modeled, we are provided with technologies that can automate the transformation of one state of information into another " (1989, p.230).
The purpose behind NI:
McGonigle and Mastrian advises that back in 2008, the American Nurses Association (ANA) updated their Scope and Standards of Nursing Informatics Practice, where they advised that " The goal of NI is to improve the health of populations, communities, families and individuals by optimizing information management and communication" (p.124).