Health care organizations have been investing in electronic medical records or EMR's for several reasons, like improving access to medical records, decreasing redundancy of data entry, and creating medical records that can be easily accessed electronically. As these electronic medical records continue to significantly increase across the country, the specialty of nursing informatics has continue to grow in demand in the past few years.
Nursing informatics is an area of the nursing profession that specializes in supporting clinical applications in settings like hospitals, doctor offices, and nursing homes. The definition of nursing informatics, as provided by Craven and Corcoran in 1989, is a "combination of computer science, information science and nursing science designed to assist in the management and process of nursing data, information and knowledge to support the practice of nursing and the delivery of nursing care." An informatics nurse integrates the practice of nursing with information science to configure or develop systems which can help other nurses to document or affect patient care.
Depending on the setting, the roles of informatics nurses can vary. In a health care organization, informatics nurses can assist during the implementation of a project by collecting data on the current paper workflows, configuring an electronic system, testing the system, training users, and supporting the implementation of the system. Outside of this setting, vendors can hire these nurses to work in areas such as programming, product design, project management, consulting, or other roles which take into consideration their unique knowledge and experience.
And how can a nurse become an informatics nurse? When implementing a system, many hospitals look for their current nurses to help with the implementation. In many occasions they want somebody to train the rest of the users in a unit, and these nurses become super users of the system. They help out with training, and when the project is over, many of these nurses are either offered jobs as an informatics nurse, or they go on to find jobs on their own using this training experience as a launching pad into the field.
Additionally, vendors of clinical applications like to recruit for nurses for these jobs and they are willing to train interested candidates into entry level positions. Also, many nurses nowadays have the option of finding nursing informatics master degree programs in many universities across the country. These programs require nurses to have at least a year of clinical experience, and it usually takes two years to complete the program on a full time basis. A master's degree in nursing informatics should be considered for those wanting to go into managerial roles.
The nursing informatics salary can start in the mid 50's for entry level candidates and can go well above six figures for experienced candidates who work in managerial roles, or as consultants in the field. The same range applies for health informatics salary .