Nursing informatics: two foundational developments

Abstract

Health informatics technologies exist to support the work of the health professionals. As successful healthcare outcomes increasingly rest on the active participation of patients and lay persons, these technologies must also directly support the important contributions of patients as they engage in self-help, self-care, and disease management activities. The unique role of nursing in the healthcare system is to attend to those aspects of the person that constitute the human response to disease and development, and to deliver interventions that help to compensate for, restore, or improve patients’ abilities to manage health status. This uniqueness is reflected in the terms used by nurses to characterize patient problems, which are operationally distinct from those used in medicine, and also in the nature of homecare technologies needed by nurses. Nurses provide an important but distinct contribution to patient care, and the informatics technologies needed to support nurses and their patients are complementary but distinctly different from those that support the medical aspect of care. Two developments in health informatics, formal languages and telehealth, serve as the core foundations of technological support for healthcare in the twenty-first century. Nurses contribute to and benefit from advances in language development and telehealth innovations.