NURSING INFORMATICS SPECIALIST (NIS)

Nurses play a critical role in the continuous development and improvement of health care technology. The contribution of nurses in developing and improving technology such as electronic medical records and computerized provider ordering has been crucial in reducing medical errors, patient care delays, and health care costs. The term “nursing informatics” was firstly proposed by Scholes and Barber in 1976 (Scholes and Barber, 1976). Since then, nursing informatics has become one of the cornerstones in the field of health informatics.

WHAT IS NURSING INFORMATICS?

Nursing informatics is a field of nursing that incorporates nursing, computer, and information sciences to maintain and develop medical data and systems to support the practice of nursing and to improve patient care outcomes. According to the American Nurses Association (ANA), nursing informatics is a “speciality that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice.”

Skills of Successful NIS

Nursing informatics is different from traditional nursing, and it requires one to have additional skills and personality traits. Some important traits for a successful career are:

Problem-solving skills
Strong interpersonal skills
Clinical expertise
Management ability
Good organization skills
Knowledge of technology

Analytical thinking
Communication skills
Leadership experience
Innovative thinking
Teaching ability

As the technology is growing fast world wide, the emerging role of NIS is pivotal in the health care sector of India. NIS, JPNATC is a model to the nursing world in India