Nurse leaders have critical roles in implementing new documentation systems as part of the project teams designed to enhance care delivery in their practice environment. The increased demand for data management and security of patient health information and the need to comply with regulatory requirements implore healthcare organizations to allocate more resources for the development and training of IT staff, solutions, and related systems (Kassam & Nagle, 2017). The implementation of these systems needs the inclusion of nurse leaders based on the requirement of frameworks like system development life cycle (SDLC) that offers guidelines on deploying new technology infrastructure like documentation in a healthcare entity (Sipes, 2019). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the critical role that graduate-level- nurse plays in guiding their participation in the implementation team. The role description is based on the stages and tasks of the SDLC framework.
The primary aspect addressed by nurse informaticists in the development of a documentation system that addresses inherent challenges of nursing. As the majority and the main care providers in the health workforce, they should participate and be involved actively in the development of information systems for organizations to attain successful outcomes (Verma & Gupta, 2017). The system development life cycle (SDLC) describes the systematic problem-solving approach that system developers use to design, troubleshoot, and implement an information technology system in a healthcare organization to enhance efficiency in the workflow. The system contains critical stages with respective tasks that require the inclusion of nurse informaticists at each level (Kassam & Nagle, 2017). These stages include planning and requirement definition, analysis, design of the new system, implementation, and post-implementation.
The planning and requirement definition stage identifies and analyzes the scope of the present system and provides an overview of the proposed new systems and their objectives (Yen et al., 2017). The stage entails considerations on a host of issues like time, benefits, costs, and other components of the new system. The stage also identifies constraints, threats, and security issues of the new system (Wager et al., 2017). The participation of the graduate-level nurse at this initial stage is critical to delivering the clinical nursing perspective to contribute to the development of a responsive, safe, efficient, and effective system (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018). The graduate nurse interacts with the team leaders to execute certain tasks that include determining the nature and issues of the present systems and challenges to efficiency and workflow, examination and selection of possible solutions, assimilation of required resources, and identification of project’s timelines and its initiation.
The nurse identifies the system’s requirements, from technical to clinical and medical components (Magnuson & Dixon, 2020). The nurse leader also helps in system testing and identification of any design flaws in the new system for improvement. The overriding role of the graduate nurse is bringing to the fore the concerns of frontline nurses so that the new system is tailored to meet their needs as super and end-users (Wang et al., 2018). The failure to include the nurse at this stage means that the team will not capture the system needs of frontline nurses as end-users of the new documentation system.
The analysis stage helps the implementation team to establish the system’s processes and workflows. A determination to ascertain if the requirements offered are satisfactory and an evaluation of the processes for possible changes or alterations happen at this stage. The analysis stage also defines the requirements and prototype of the new system at this stage (Kassam & Nagle, 2017). The graduate nurse has key roles at this stage of working with the interdisciplinary team to identify the core challenges that the proposed system may pose to nurses as end-users and offer feasible solutions or seek alternatives from the team. The graduate nurse should have an idea of how the system will be deployed and the anticipated challenges to make informed suggestions and recommend alternatives (Magnuson & Dixon, 2020). Through this approach, the team will avoid implementing a system that possesses obvious faults for use in the facility.
The design stage defines core components of the new system including the databases, applications, system, and user interfaces that will be deployed in the facility. These components represent the functional
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