NURS 6051 Week 4 Assignment The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies PATRICIA Essay

NURS 6051 Week 4 Assignment The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies PATRICIA Essay

NURS 6051 Week 4 Assignment The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies PATRICIA Essay

The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies

Nursing informatics aims to enhance the delivery of healthcare, facilitate overall patient care, and improve the lives of the community by reducing healthcare costs. Nursing informatics goals include facilitating communication and documentation, streamlining processes and workflows, and decreasing healthcare costs. This paper includes a nursing informatics project proposal to the leadership team of my healthcare organization. The project seeks to enhance patients’ health outcomes and improve efficiencies in patient-care.

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Proposed Project

The proposed nursing informatics project for our organization is smart bed technology. Smart beds have surfaced in the past years as integrated solutions to patient care and assistance and monitoring. They enhance patient safety in the inpatient setting by monitoring their movement, weight, and vital signs (Hong, 2018). They use a wireless sensor network, allowing nurses to monitor hospitalized patients in their respective units continuously.  Nurses can monitor patients through regular updates from the technology on patients’ activities, including movement.

The smart bed technology project has been informed by the increasing number of patient falls and pressure ulcers in the inpatient units, especially among geriatrics and acute-ill patients. Patient falls and pressure ulcers have been a major concern in the hospital due to their associated implications of injuries, fractures, prolonged hospitalization, and increasing healthcare costs (Slade et al., 2017).  The smart beds have sensors that help to prevent patient falls. Nurses can monitor a patient’s movement and thus be able to recognize unusual movements in a fall-risk patient. Smart beds analyze patient movement through touch and pressure applied on surface sensors that cause irritation and alarm the nurse to take action, such as turning the patient to prevent pressure ulcers (Cicceri et al., 2020). In addition to improving patient safety, smart beds focus on improving patient comfort, essential in increasing patient satisfaction with care (Hong, 2018). Furthermore, since it helps monitor vital signs, it will enable nurses to easily detect abnormal or changes in vital signs in the patient, thus promoting prompt nursing interventions.

The Stakeholders Impacted By the Smart Bed Project

The smart bed project will impact various external and internal stakeholders. External stakeholders include patients who are the major focus of this project. The project is designed to promote patient comfort, improve patient safety, and better health outcomes by preventing incidences of falls and pressure ulcers. Consequently, it will have the greatest impact on patients by improving the quality and safety of care (Elsokah & Zerek, 2019). Reduced falls, and pressure ulcers will reduce associated complications such as fractures, injuries, infected ulcers, and sepsis (Slade et al., 2017). As a result, the project will reduce the hospitalization period and ultimately lower healthcare costs associated with prolonged stays and treatment of complications.  Furthermore, improved comfort and safety of care will promote better health outcomes for patients and improve their quality of life.

The project will impact various internal stakeholders, including nurses, physicians, and top-level managers.  Nurses will benefit from the project since the smart bed will facilitate more effective remote patient monitoring. It will promote improved patient-nurse communication since the smart bed connects to a call system that the patient uses to communicate to the nurse if they require assistance.  Since nurses can monitor a patient’s movement and vitals from the nurse’s desk, they will have more time to implement and evaluate nursing care interventions and save the time used to rotate in every patient bed. Besides, the smart bed technology will reduce nurses’ workload of frequent monitoring, taking vital signs, and turning patients, thus preventing associated fatigue and burnout. Reduced nurses’ burnout is associated with high morale and improved productivity. Furthermore, reduced patient falls, and pressure ulcers will decrease physicians’ workload. Pressure ulcers often require surgical procedures such as debridement, while fractures secondary to falls require orthopedic procedures, which increase the workload for surgeons.

The project will impact top-level hospital managers since it will require financial resources to initiate and maintain, thus affecting the organization. The top-level managers will be required to decide on the financing of the smart beds, including purchase, maintenance, and training of providers. Nevertheless, the project will have a higher return on investments since it will lower healthcare costs caused by prolonged hospitalization from falls and pressure ulcers.  Increased patient satisfaction from improved comfort will further increase profits for the organization.

Patient Outcomes/ Care Efficiencies the Project Is Aimed At Improving

The smart bed project aims to improve patients’ comfort and the safety of patient care by preventing falls and pressure ulcers. The technologies used in the smart bed will enable nurses to monitor patients’ movements and thus take necessary actions for fall-risk patients such as bedridden, confused, acute-ill, and geriatrics (Elsokah & Zerek, 2019). Reduced patient falls and pressure ulcers mean improved health outcomes and quality of life. In addition, the smart bed project is aimed at reducing hospital stays and decreasing healthcare costs. Smart beds will aim at improving the delivery of nursing care by easing nurses’ work of monitoring patients. Nurses will be able to monitor patients’ vital signs and physical movements using a central monitor from the nurses’ desk (Cicceri et al., 2020). As a result, it will reduce the time taken in conducting 4-hourly vital signs check and  allow more time for other nursing interventions. The project aims at reducing the nursing workload thus decreasing fatigue and burnout among nurses. Burnout has been associated with a high turnover rate and the project may help increase nurses’ retention in the organization.

Technologies Required Implementing the Smart Bed Technology Project

The smart bed incorporates various modern technologies, including actuating solutions, graphical interfaces, and environment-aware sensors. These technologies provide a higher degree of service and function (Elsokah & Zerek, 2019). The functions include real-time monitoring, patient assistance, computerized functions and positions, advanced communication, and data logging. In addition, implementing the smart bed will require graphical and user interfaces and environment-aware sensors, which provide a higher degree of service and a broad range of functions (Elsokah & Zerek, 2019). It will also require a monitor, alert, protect (MAP) system, which is developed to help nurses by giving them real-time images of a patient’s pressure points. MAP has a mat that senses pressure, which is placed on a mattress and a bedside monitor. The mat has numerous sensing points that constantly register the amount of pressure exerted upon them by a patient and convey that information to the monitor (Cicceri et al., 2020). The smart bed will require pressure sensor technology, which analyzes health status indicators, including respirations, fluid retention, and movement.

Project Team and Incorporation of the Nurse Informaticist in the Project Team

The team involved in implementing the project will include a project manager, technology engineer, nurse-lead, physician-lead, and nurse informaticist. The project manager’s roles will include overseeing the implementation of the project, guiding the team members, and facilitating communication in the team. The technology engineer will be tasked with fixing the beds with user interfaces, pads, and monitors and customizing the beds aesthetically (Ghersi et al., 2018). The nurse lead will represent nurses and give input on how the smart bed should be designed to improve the delivery of nursing care and improve patient safety. Besides, the nurse lead will guide the team on the features that should be included in the smart bed to help improve patient safety (Ghersi et al., 2018). The physician-lead will also represent physicians and offer input on how the smart bed should be designed to improve patient safety and health outcomes.

The nurse informaticist will be incorporated into the project implementation team by consulting them on the design of the smart beds. They will be asked for input on the features and technologies that should be incorporated into the smart bed to achieve the project’s goals (Ghersi et al., 2018). Besides, the nurse informaticist will be tasked with educating nurses in the hospital on the use of bed technology and how it can improve the delivery of nursing care.

Conclusion

The proposed nursing informatics project for the organization is the smart bed technology. The smart bed project aims to reduce patient falls and pressure ulcers in order to improve patient safety and health outcomes and increase patient satisfaction with care. Smart bed technology will enable nurses to monitor bedridden patients, thus easing delivery of nursing care and reducing workload. The project will significantly impact patients, nurses, physicians, and the organization through improved health outcomes and decreased healthcare costs.

References

Cicceri, G., De Vita, F., Bruneo, D., Merlino, G., & Puliafito, A. (2020). A deep learning approach for pressure ulcer prevention using wearable computing. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 10(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13673-020-0211-8

Elsokah, M. M., & Zerek, A. R. (2019). Next-generation of medical care bed with internet of things solutions. In 2019 19th international conference on sciences and techniques of automatic control and computer engineering (STA) (pp. 84-89). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/STA.2019.8717204.

Ghersi, I., Mariño, M., & Miralles, M. T. (2018). Smart medical beds in patient-care environments of the twenty-first century: a state-of-art survey. BMC medical informatics and decision making, 18(1), 63. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-018-0643-5

Hong, Y. S. (2018). Smart care beds for elderly patients with impaired mobility. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/1780904

Slade, S. C., Carey, D. L., Hill, A. M., & Morris, M. E. (2017). Effects of falls prevention interventions on falls outcomes for hospitalized adults: protocol for a systematic review with meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 7(11), e017864. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017864

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The Assignment: (4-5 pages not including the title and reference page)

In a 4- to 5-page project proposal written to the leadership of your healthcare organization, propose a nursing informatics project for your organization that you advocate to improve patient outcomes or patient-care efficiency. Your project proposal should include the following:

Describe the project you propose.
Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.
Explain the patient outcome(s) or patient-care efficiencies this project is aimed at improving and explain how this improvement would occur. Be specific and provide examples.
Identify the technologies required to implement this project and explain why.
Identify the project team (by roles) and explain how you would incorporate the nurse informaticist in the project team.
Use APA format and include a title page and reference page.
Use the Safe Assign Drafts to check your match percentage before submitting your work.