How can informatics be utilised by nurses to improve patient safety and experience?

In January 2013 Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, presented the NHS with a Challenge to go paperless by 2018, to improve services and meet the challenging needs of the population and save millions.

It’s been suggested that if healthcare settings were to transition to paper free or paper light the NHS will see an increase in patient safety and experience, release time to care and save the NHS money.

The purpose of this international study was to identify the benefits and challenges of creating a paper light hospital and identify if informatics in nursing can improve patient safety and experience and decrease the burden of documentation on nursing staff.

The study included visits to Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust to view their electronic patient records in practice. A visit to Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, to discuss the planning and implementation of the Epic electronic patient record. Then finally a visit to Kaiser Permanente Hospitals and informatics team in San Francisco, California.

There were a range of benefits identified including, improved patient safety, reduction in errors, improved patient outcomes and experience, time released to care, and improved communications. The cost savings were not as easily to quantify or as obvious to identify. The main challenges that were identified I grouped into 4 main areas that included, issues with infrastructure and equipment, planning and implementation, staff resistance and software support.

Based on the information gained from this study my recommendations for informatics in the UK is to continue to empower nurses and clinicians to get involved and share ideas when it comes to electronic working and sharing the success of individual projects. To continue to work on the efforts to get all care settings within the UK to share information of patients to ensure continuity of care and communication between settings. There also needs to be a level of standardisation to the records that are kept and monitor that the patients feel involved in their care and do not feel that technology is becoming a barrier of effective communication.

The knowledge gained of the challenges and benefits will allow me to utilise this during implementation of electronic patient records within my own organisation. There is a range of data that is essential to gain pre implementation to then make a comparison to ensure an improvement has been made. It is difficult to measure improvements post implementation when there is absent date of current processes.

During the planning and implantation stage of electronic systems in our trust I will be able to consider the knowledge gained of the challenges that other sites have already encountered and the solutions that they have developed. This will help our trust save time and increase confidence in our systems. The most beneficial lesson learnt to take back to my practice is the involvement of all clinicians within the trust from the beginning to the end of the process. This cannot be underestimated.

The experience and knowledge gained during this study tour, provides the evidence that the use of informatics and electronic patient records does increase patient safety and experience and release nursing time to care. However there remains a long journey ahead to incorporate decision support and leverage the data to increase safety and experience further.