Paging Nurse Educators to Informatics!
Six years after being a registered nurse, I was finally introduced to the concept of health informatics and how it relates to nursing. I vaguely remember the word informatics being thrown around in nursing school lectures, but with the amount of information a student nurse must absorb and regurgitate during those weekly exams it is almost impossible for everything to stick. It was during a graduate course aptly named Nursing Informatics that I finally understood the area of expertise nurses can work in and how they influence and shape healthcare. Nursing Informatics is defined by the American Nurses Association as "the specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information management and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage, and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice" (ANA, 2014). Essentially, nursing informatics a field of study in which RNs systematically collect, analyze, interpret, manipulate, and apply nursing inf