Nursing Informatics Competencies

In this Discussion, you identify the role informatics plays in your professional
responsibilities. You pinpoint personal gaps in skills and knowledge and then develop a
plan for self-improvement.

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Nursing Informatics Competencies

Informatics has become an imperative concept in nursing practice, and all practitioners are
required to be competent in some aspects that are related to their functions. Bickford (2009) has
documented standards of practice in some functional areas in which nurses should be competent
as far as informatics is concerned. The key functional areas of nursing informatics relevant to my
current position are: assessment as well as diagnosis, problem, and issues identification. These
functional areas are relevant to me because they perfectly define my roles as a nurse in my
current position. Promotion of a patient’s heath largely depends on the nurse’s ability to assess
available data and utilize this information to perform correct diagnosis before selecting the most
appropriate health improvement approach for the patient (Darvish, Bahramnezhad, Keyhanian
and Navidhamidi, 2014). As a clinician, I must be in a position to use information technology to
collect a whole patient’s data and relate that information to emerging evidence. Furthermore, I
must be able to analyze assessment data to locate the major health problem or issue affecting my
patient, and to devise appropriate plans for improvement.
The TIGER Initiative has published three categories of nursing informatics competencies
which nurses are expected to possess for them to perform their roles effectively in modern
healthcare organizations. The three groups of competencies include; clinical information
management, basic computer skills, and information literacy (Hunter, Dee, and Hebda, 2012).
Three major skills are pertinent to my functional areas and in which I need to strengthen my
abilities. As far as basic computer competency is concerned, I should learn how to effectively
use a computer to merge a patient’s health data. Currently, I can perfectly enter a patient’s health
data into a computer on different sheets. However, I need to be guided on how I can put all these

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layers together to have the data in one place as this is very crucial during health assessments
(Darvish, et. al., 2014).
On information literacy competencies, I need to improve my research skills to be able to gather
both secondary and primary data related to a patient’s health. Specifically, I experience
difficulties in retrieving the right information from research materials. For this reason, I need
guidance on how I can strengthen my research skills to improve my assessment and diagnosis
abilities. Furthermore, as far as clinical information competency is concerned, I should
strengthen my abilities to relate components of electronic medical records to generate
meaningful data from them. Being a contemporary organization, my current institution has
successfully integrated an electronic health records system that it uses to store and share patients’
data (Moen and Knudsen, 2013). I still experience some difficulties when using the technology
because I cannot effectively relate various aspects of the records to generate meaningful
information for health assessment and diagnosis.
To improve my skills in the areas described above, I will seek for assistance from my supervisor
and senior members of staff. Additionally, I will attend all employee training sessions organized
by my organization in these areas. Furthermore, as supported by Hunter, Dee, and Hebda (2012),
I will practice consistently to ensure that I master all important aspects of the three categories of
competencies published by the TIGER Initiative. Through my supervisor, I will obtain necessary
training materials on nursing informatics that my organization currently provides for all
interested individuals. Developing nursing informatics competencies will increase my
effectiveness as a nurse because I will be in a position to use information technology tools to
perform health-related assessments and to identify patients’ problems that need to be solved
(Bickford, 2009).

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References

Bickford, C. J. (2009). Nursing Informatics: Scope and standards of practice. Studies in Health
Technology and Informatics, 146: 855

Darvish, A., Bahramnezhad, F., Keyhanian, S. & Navidhamidi, M. (2014). The role of nursing
informatics in promoting quality of healthcare and the need for appropriate education,
Global Journal of Health Science, 6(6):11-18.

Hunter, K., Dee, M., & Hebda, T. (2012). Operationalizing TIGER NI competencies for online
assessment of perceived competency. Nursing Informatics, 2012: 181.

Moen, A. & Knudsen, L. M. (2013). Nursing informatics: Decades of contribution to health
informatics. Health Informatics Research, 19(2): 86-92.