WANTED: Informatics Resources and Learning Activities

EACH YEAR. members of the advisory committees of the Bureau of Health Professions (BHP), Health Resources and Services Administration, meet for an All-Advisory Committee meeting to discuss important interprofessional issues. This year, we examined interprofessional education with a focus on competencies. Several documents, including the Institute of Medicine's Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (Greiner & Knebel, 2003) and Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) (Cronenwett et al., 2007), provided guidance for our work. As a member of the National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice (NACNEP), I was on a working group focused on informatics competencies. As you can imagine, I was excited about the opportunity to dialogue with colleagues and learn about what other health care professions are doing in the area of informatics. While I was disappointed to learn that other health professions do not appear to be addressing informatics, I was proud that nursing is a leader in this area. Nursing has already recognized the importance of informatics and has begun the journey to identify informatics competencies. Several important initiatives catalyzed our work. Way back in 2006, the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform project (TIGER) brought together nursing leaders to define a vision and a three-year action plan related to informatics education for all nurses. And the QSEN project (http://qsen.org) has already defined the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed by prelicensure and graduate nurses. The NLN's position statement, Preparing the Next Generation of Nurses to Practice in a Technology-rich Environment: An Informatics Agenda (www.nln.org/aboutnIn/PositionStatements/index.htm), and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing's Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice (www.aacn.nche.edu/education/essentials.htm) also exemplify nursing's leadership. NACNEP's recently released Seventh Annual Report to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the US Congress (2009), Challenges Facing the Nurse Workforce in a Changing Environment, reiterates the importance of preparing nurses to use health information technology in their practice.The report calls upon the federal government to "provide funding for capacity building (faculty development) about health information technologies and informatics and to encourage the development of health care informatics curriculum as it is essential to widespread adoption and effective use of health information technologies" (p. 66) to improve patient care. There is no doubt: Nursing is committed to an informatics agenda. To this end, the NLN's Educational Technology and Information Management Advisory Council (ETIMAC) started work on an Informatics Toolkit for use by nurse educators. The toolkit, released this fall, is a work in progress. (See www.nln.org/facultydevelopment/ facultyresources/index.htm.) Initiated as a product of the Informatics Competencies Task Group (Skiba, 2008), the goal is to create a resource that faculty can access to develop their own informatics competencies and use for incorporating informatics into the nursing curriculum. The toolkit has a "Getting Started" section that provides useful advice. The toolkit identifies resources according to three categories: computer literacy or fluency, information literacy, and informatics. Both computer and information literacy are considered prerequisites for informatics competencies. A set of resources, including articles, websites, syllabi, and educational opportunities, is coded according to four curricular threads: use of health information technology, communication, issues, and nursing involvement. These threads were derived from an examination of the various competencies proposed by QSEN and the AACN. They are defined as follows: * Use of health information technology to augment/support the nursing care process Includes concepts such as safety, care improvement, decision assistance/support, outcome analysis, and data analysis. …