Example Career: Informatics Nurse Specialists

Career Description

Apply knowledge of nursing and informatics to assist in the design, development, and ongoing modification of computerized health care systems. May educate staff and assist in problem solving to promote the implementation of the health care system.

What Job Titles Informatics Nurse Specialists Might Have

• Business Consultant
• Clinical Informatics
• Clinical Informatics Director
• Clinical Information Systems Director
• Consultant

What Informatics Nurse Specialists Do

• Design, develop, select, test, implement, and evaluate new or modified informatics solutions, data structures, and decision-support mechanisms to support patients and health care professionals within health care contexts.
• Analyze and interpret patient, nursing, or information systems data to improve nursing services.
• Apply knowledge of computer science, information science, nursing, and informatics theory to nursing practice, education, administration, or research, in collaboration with other health informatics specialists.
• Translate nursing practice information between nurses and systems engineers, analysts, or designers using object-oriented models or other techniques.
• Develop strategies, policies or procedures for introducing, evaluating or modifying information technology applied to nursing practice, administration, education, or research.
• Develop or implement policies or practices to ensure the privacy, confidentiality, or security of patient information.
• Identify, collect, record or analyze data that are relevant to the nursing care of patients.
• Read current literature, talk with colleagues, and participate in professional organizations or conferences to keep abreast of developments in informatics.
• Provide consultation to nurses regarding hardware or software configuration.
• Disseminate information about nursing informatics science and practice to the profession, other health care professions, nursing students, and the public.
• Develop, implement or evaluate health information technology applications, tools, processes or structures to assist nurses with data management.
• Use informatics science to design or implement health information technology applications to resolve clinical or health care administrative problems.
• Develop or deliver training programs for health information technology, creating operating manuals as needed.
• Analyze computer and information technologies to determine applicability to nursing practice, education, administration and research.
• Inform local, state, national and international health policies related to information management and communication, confidentiality and security, patient safety, infrastructure development and economics.
• Design, conduct, or provide support to nursing informatics research.

What Informatics Nurse Specialists Should Be Good At

• Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
• Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
• Fluency of Ideas - The ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic (the number of ideas is important, not their quality, correctness, or creativity).
• Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
• Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
• Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
• Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
• Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
• Mathematical Reasoning - The ability to choose the right mathematical methods or formulas to solve a problem.

What Informatics Nurse Specialists Should Be Interested In

• Investigative - Investigative occupations frequently involve working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. These occupations can involve searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.

What Informatics Nurse Specialists Need to Learn

• Customer and Personal Service - Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
• Computers and Electronics - Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
• Education and Training - Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.
• English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
• Medicine and Dentistry - Knowledge of the information and techniques needed to diagnose and treat human injuries, diseases, and deformities. This includes symptoms, treatment alternatives, drug properties and interactions, and preventive health-care measures.
• Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
• Communications and Media - Knowledge of media production, communication, and dissemination techniques and methods. This includes alternative ways to inform and entertain via written, oral, and visual media.