Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Roy L Simpson.
As health care increasingly becomes a global industry, it increasingly comes face-to-face with global challenges. Fortunately, information technology can play a key role in meeting those challenges--if it can achieve ubiquity. This article addresses some of the reasons why healthcare is going global only slowly and offer solutions for nursing that will help it to play a role in accelerating that process.
Although information technology is the foundation of global healthcare, its ultimate success as an enabler rests on balancing its potential against the problems it can create. This article examines the impact and implications of technology in a global marketplace, detailing key organizational, cultural, and clinical issues.
With the worsening nursing shortage and increasingly diverse patient population, nursing can no longer afford to maintain its traditional homogeneity. This article will discuss how information technology is playing and can play a role in recruiting, retaining, and assessing diversity in nursing.
Few would argue the efficiencies made possible by technology. However, technology goes beyond efficiency in healthcare, to actually help nurses provide better care. This article will examine the historical relationship among nursing, caring, and technology while explaining how technology reinforces--rather than destroys--the unique and intangible quality of caring in nursing.
The Institute of Medicine's landmark report asserted medical error is seldom the fault of individuals, but the result of faulty healthcare policy/procedure systems. Numerous studies have shown that information technology can shore up weak systems. For nursing, information technology plays a key role in protecting patients by eliminating nursing mistakes and protecting nurses by reducing their negative exposure. However, managing information technology is a function of managing the people who use it. This article examines critical issues that impact patient and nurse safety, both physical and professional. It discusses the importance of eliminating the culture of blame, the requirements of process change, how to implement technology in harmony with the organization and the significance of vision.
As new informational technologies emerge and ever more innovative applications of existing technologies are found, new circumstances will also evolve. The ethical issues involved in these situations will challenge forward-looking nurse leaders to become aware of the matters in question and to employ critical thinking to ensure that information technology serves all stakeholders well.
Although numerous studies have shown that information technology (IT) improves care, makes the workplace better for clinicians, and reduces costs, healthcare-especially nursing-has been slow to adopt it for a variety of reasons. However, because of a worsening nursing shortage, couples with increasing healthcare costs and administrative overhead, nursing demands that IT become not only common, but pervasive, playing a role in every aspect of nursing, from recruitment and education, to patient care. This article will examine the several potential applications of IT to nursing and their benefits, challenges to widespread IT adoption, and the importance of IT ubiquity to the very viability of the profession.
When we think about ethics in nursing, such things as "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) orders and euthanasia come to mind. However, in the information age, there are some often-overlooked ethical issues surrounding information and information systems. This article examines several information technology influences and their impact on the issues of ethics, integrity, and trust.
As the voice of and advocate for nurses, nursing administration should assume the leadership position in the development of evidence-based practice models. One of its most important tasks is to advocate for ubiquitous information technology (IT) to support these models. This article examines evidence-based nursing and the importance of IT to its development and growth. It explains the role of nursing administration in guiding IT implementation, as well as key issues that must be examined in system selection and development.
Healthcare is evolving from a task-based industry to a knowledge-based one. To gain and retain value as intellectual capital, nursing likewise must evolve from a vocation of task performers to a profession of knowledge-workers. Information technology can transform nursing tasks into nursing knowledge.