Central trends in nursing informatics: students' reflections from International Congress on Nursing Informatics 2014 (Taipei, Taiwan).

Abstract

In July 2014, Taipei, Taiwan, hosted the biennial International Congress on Nursing Informatics (NI2014), titled East Meets West: eSMART+. This inaugural event for the Asia Pacific geographic region was organized by Taiwan’s Nursing Informatics Association and International Medical Informatics AssociationNursing Informatics Special Interest Group (IMIA-NISIG). The Congress attracted more than 500 participants from 28 countries, including about 80 students. There were more than 300 presentations, panel presentations, student papers, and poster sessions. At a specially organized student event, members of the Nursing Informatics Students’ Working Group had the opportunity tomeet and seek consensus about trends seen in the presentations. This meeting was followed by a collaborative writing effort, inspired by a similar publication by students in health geography.1Our goal in this article is to highlight the central themes presented at the Congress from the perspective of student participants and to provide a historical reference of the current topics, methodologies, and vision that inform and advance current nursing informatics research. We explore the five topics of interest that we found at NI2014: (1) standardized terminologies, (2) big data, (3) patient activation, (4) nursing informatics education and competencies, and (5) mobile health. To recognize some recent methodological trends in nursing informatics, we also present a methodological highlight regarding triangulation in health information technology.