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Bridging the gap between nurses and IT
A laptop computer sits in the newly-opened Berenson Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center July 16, 2001 in Boston, Mass.
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Steve Chiotakis: As we await today's big April employment report from the Labor Department, medical jobs are still growing by leaps and bounds, including the position of Nursing Informaticist.
From the Marketplace health desk at WHYY in Philadelphia, Gregory Warner reports even though most of us don't know what that is, the job's in pretty big demand.
Gregory Warner: Don't tell her boss, but Diane Humbrecht gets a lot of recruitment calls.
Diane Humbrecht: Several every week.
Warner: Trying to pull you away from this hospital?
Humbrecht: That's right! But I love it here.
"Here" is Abington Memorial Hospital, where Diane is director of nursing informatics. She helps clinicians talk to the IT staff and vice versa.
Humbrecht: So we help translate. I always think of us as a translator.
Between nurse speak and geek speak. For example, when the quick stroke of a pen is replaced by a series of mouse clicks, to type in the same information over and over on multiple screens, nurses will complain to IT.
Humbrecht: And IT will be like, "Why?" But if it comes through us, we can explain it in a different way -- in their language.
And get IT to make the system easier before nurses revolt.
And revolt, they have. Not at Abington, but at other hospitals.
Joann Spetz: There are a lot of nurses who did not grow up with computers.
Joann Spetz is an economics professor in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. She says that hospitals are spending billions of dollars to go electronic before a federal deadline of 2015.
Spetz: You know when these systems work, they can be great for patient care. But when they don't work, either because there's a flaw in the system, or because there's a problem with the implementation and the buy-in, it can basically be wasted money. And even worse, we've seen cases of patients getting harmed.
So hospitals are desperate to hire informaticists -- or technology therapists -- like Diane.
Humbrecht: You gotta go and sit with the staff. Tell them it's OK. Show them, look you can do this, and then they're just thrilled.
Nursing informaticists earn an average $99,000 a year -- up from $70,000 in 2004. For Diane, there's a greater mission to getting nurses to go electronic.
Humbrecht: Because as nurses, we really haven't been able to tell the world really what we do. It's all anecdotal. But now, I actually have documentation and data to quantify what a nurse does every hour of the day.
So hospitals can learn from the best nurses. And as a nurse herself, Diane is happy to help her profession. As a techie, she knows that nothing's real until it's digitized.
In Abington, Penn., I'm Gregory Warner for Marketplace.
Following a Corporate decision to standardize the HCIS system between our facilities and the subsequent implementation, a large gap was identified at the facility I worked for. As an Ancillary dept manager, I worked along side the IT dept assisting in the ‘build out’ of the program for our specific use, realized there was a language barrier between the Financial/Billing side and all the hospital departments. For the past three years my job has been to decipher requests, research processes resulting in billing delays, spend time with staff to understand their processes with the ultimate goal of decreasing the revenue cycle time line. The job has evolved into one that probes all areas, breaks down barriers and has grown to provide a worth far beyond our wildest expectation. It was a gamble to leave the known for the unknown but has resulted in being an essential part of our financial well being.
If there's a high demand I don't see it. I am an RN that is also dual-degreed and experienced in computer science. I have certificates galore including HIT.
However I was routinely snubbed by non-technical Informatics Managers who would then hire a nurse with no informatics or technical knowledge that they were friends with. Similarly, the recruiters would only try and place you if you had specific experience with whatever emr on hand. no appreciation nor thought that I knew everything from networks and security to databases and performance tuning at all. Nevermind I understand the workflow of clinicians, datasets and ICD, HIPAA, LOINC, HL7...I finally took a position with a non-hospital vendor. Though I'm happy with this, nonetheless it would be hard to find anyone more qualified to bridge a gap between IT and nursing.
Given this experience it's difficult to feel very sorry for whining managers about shortages and 'not getting potential' out of their investments, failed projects and just reaping the results of bad decisions.
