Education in Nursing Informatics

Nurses at all levels of practice and specialization do their work, make decisions, and determine responses to treatment based on data, information and evidence. They do not blindly follow orders but take action based on critical thinking using data points and a distinct body of evidence. Nurses are often the last point of interaction between a patient and a treatment. Because of this awesome responsibility nurses function as knowledge workers ethically bound to provide safe and quality care. To improve the health of patients, families, communities, and populations, nurses collect data and generate information from numerous sources as they chronicle assessments, interventions, and outcomes. Nurses organize data for analysis and dissemination to nursing peers and members of the interprofessional care and administrative team. Nurses and other members of the healthcare team use the information derived from these data as the basis for optimal clinical decision-making.Increasingly, nurses are using information and communication technologies to facilitate the collection of data and informatics processes to create information supportive of their practice. Faculty in nursing educational programs are tasked with preparing nurses for practice, which includes the use of the information and communications technology tools at their disposal to efficiently, effectively, and ethically generate information and knowledge for care. This is the goal. However, evidence points to a significant gap in competency in the informatics domain among practicing nurses. The origin of the gap is often rooted in the gap in informatics knowledge of the educators. This chapter will provide an overview of the history of informatics in nursing education highlighting the importance of the topic to the profession, an update on the expected informatics competencies, capabilities and expected practices of all nurses as well as the informatics nurse specialist, and a description of the resources and organizations that can be used to address the gap in both faculty, students and practitioners.