Directions: After completing your interview, you must use this form to submit your assignment to Dropbox. You may use the form to capture information as you conduct your interview, or fill it in later. The form is expandable and will enlarge the textbox to accommodate your answers. Do not rely only on this form for everything you must include!
| Criteria | Fill in the answers in this column. |
| Demographics: Provide initials of the RN, official job title of the interviewee, and the date the interview was conducted. | B., Informatics Nurse. Interview conducted: October 6, 2015. |
| Required Questions (answer EVERY question in this section) | |
| After obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Christine Lynn College of Nursing, Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL), the interviewee worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant in a cardiologist’s office in a medical center in Boca Raton. Later, she obtained a Master of Science in Nursing from Christine Lynn College of Nursing, as well as the licensure of an RN, and found a vacancy for an RN in the Mercy Miami Hospital’s Heart Center; the application was successful, and the interviewee moved to Miami. Later, as the interviewee had excellent computer skills, was interested in healthcare electronic systems, and often volunteered to help with their implementation, she was offered a position of Informatics Nurse in 2014 in Mercy Miami Hospital and accepted it. Education:
Working experience:
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| According to the interviewee, evidence-based practice is an important and indispensable component of any effective nursing care, for it allows to bridge the gap between what nurses know in theory and what they do in practice. Clinical research is what permits us to capture and analyze the situations emerging in the process of nursing care to understand which ways lead to the best patient outcomes. In the facility where the interviewee works, the nurses regularly attempt to perform quantitative measurements of how it is better to care for patients with particular diseases, and then apply the best ways while caring for the ill. |
| The nurse stated that various technologies are being used in their center to facilitate diagnosing and treatment and make them safer for the patients. For instance, in The Heart Center, cardiac imagining technologies are used, which allows for easy and non-invasive evaluation of myocardial perfusion. Electronic healthcare records allow for quick access to the information related to the condition of a patient. In the hospital, the Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is used; the interviewee takes part in managing the system and trains the personnel to use it properly. |
| An example of such technologies is the already mentioned CPOE, a type of software that allows to better administer medications and healthcare procedures to the patients. CPOE allows for the quick and effective administration of treatment. It is also capable of detecting various mistakes or drawbacks (for instance, an error in the dose of medications or in the time when it should be taken, or the fact that two particular drugs should not be taken together). There are also disadvantages; for instance, people sometimes tend to rely too much on the software and feel that it is a safe method, which may cause less attentive administration. It also sometimes reduces the amount of communication between the nursing staff and physicians. Besides, in some cases, GIGO (an unwanted, unintended input of data that produces an undesired output of information) also causes confusion and trouble. |
| Physicians and nurses rely on the technologies that the interviewee works with and teaches the personnel how to use them. For instance, CPOE is used by physicians to prescribe drugs and procedures; nurses then administer these drugs and procedures to the patients. Nurses also use the system to provide feedback to the doctors. |
| Optional Questions (Answer only ONE question from the choices below.) | |
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| According to the interviewee, the lack of interprofessional collaboration often has a serious negative impact on patient care and causes frustration among the personnel. For instance, poor communication between nurses and physicians very often results in delays, and some cases may even lead to making some serious mistakes while the patient is being cared for. Besides the lack of time that hinders the contact, there also exists the feeling of superiority among some doctors, which significantly worsens the relationship between the two professions and further exacerbates the communication between the two groups of specialists. It leads to lower levels of health care and worse patient outcomes. Besides, in some cases, interprofessional communication also poses a problem; as a result of being busy or due to some peculiarities in relationships, nurses sometimes fail to properly communicate about the caring issues, which also hinders the working process. The failures in communication and collaboration, especially the interprofessional ones, caused the interviewee to be interested in the electronic means of communication, and medical software systems in particular. Even though technology in some cases reduces the amount of direct communication, the nurse feels that it helps to overcome some difficulties often encountered when such means are not used. |
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| Follow-Up Questions (Answer all of these. Please do not ask them during the interview. Instead, reflect and answer them afterward.) | |
| Conducting the interview has helped us to more clearly understand some important problems encountered while working as a nurse, especially communication problems. It appears that we should pay more attention to the issues of collaboration and learn to work in teams better. Besides, we have realized how important and effective it might be to implement the modern technologies in healthcare, so we are likely to attempt to learn more about computer sciences, and, in particular, study contemporary medical software, which is highly probable to become even more popular in the future. |
| Resource #1: Rojas, C. L., & Seckman, C. A. (2014). The informatics nurse specialist role in electronic health record usability evaluation. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 32(5), 214-220. doi:10.1097/CIN.0000000000000042 |
| Resource # 2: Schleyer, R. H., Burch, C. K., & Schoessler, M. T. (2011). Defining and integrating informatics competencies into a hospital nursing department. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 29(3), 167-173. doi:10.1097/NCN.0b013e3181f9db36 | |