Each area of practice lends itself to some common information requirements which can be utilized amongst health care professionals, but there are also areas such as administration that has differing information needs. While watching the VA video, the discussion around the Vista CPRS fully integrated system looked very extensive. They incorporated concepts that were derived from Blum’s and later Graves and Corcoran, which include data (objective), information (subjectively reviewed), and knowledge (formally completed content) (ANA, 2014). Although the Vista CPRS has a bountiful amount of content to support best practice, there are other areas of health needs that are specific and therefore require a unique set of system requirements. In the video, we see that a system was implemented that focused on the needs of the veterans to allow them prescription refills and other personal health needs (United Stats department of Veterans Affairs, 2011). In our area we have three major hospitals networks. The difficulty is that each of these networks have chosen different interfaces as their HIT systems. So a patient can go to two different hospitals in the same day and there is no communication or dialogue around the patients needs. This can become a dangerous situation if this patient was prescribed narcotics from two different health care prescriber and was planning on taking these together. In the hospital network I worked in, we used meditech as our HIT. This HIT system supports some evidence based practice and is great from a lab testing and sharing of patients personal data such as medical history, specific medical orders currently active and previous tests and diagnostics. Where we see it lacking is in the knowledge section. We are using another format of HIT for continuing education, looking up medication knowledge and skills. We would like to click on a patients prescribed medication and then that drug be linked to knowledge that would be applicable to the understanding and administration of it. We now must leave meditech and go into another application for this knowledge. Overall the needs of HIT continue to grow as our knowledge is being transmitted faster than ever before, and our patients’ health complexities also increase with an ageing population. Preparing for current and future trends such as seeing more integration between electronic health records, improved research, artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of robotics will be facilitated by partnerships and education amongst private and public institutions to develop an advancing approach to HIT (Sheikh et al., 2021).
ANA. (2014). Nursing Informatics (2nd Edition). American Nurses
Association. https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781558105812 Sheikh, A., Anderson, M., Albala, S., Casadei, B., Franklin, B. D., Richards, M., Taylor, D.,
Tibble, H., & Mossialos, E. (2021). Health information technology and digital innovation for national learning health and care systems. The Lancet. Digital Health, 3(6), e383–e396. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(21)00005-4
United States Department of Veterans Affairs. (Producer). (2011). Innovation in VA, the Story
of VistA [Video]. Washington, DC: Author.