Nursing Informatics Research Topics

Nursing informatics focuses on the management and dissemination of data through the use of information technologies. Nursing informatics incorporates elements of computer science, information science, nursing science, and cognitive and decision sciences with the objective of aiding and improving delivery of nursing care. Research topics in nursing informatics gravitates around four major areas of emphasis: patient-care delivery, consumer health promotion, education through information technology and using informatics to aid in nursing research. Within these four major emphases, research topics are almost infinite.

Patient-Care Delivery

• The end objective of patient-care delivery is to improve services rendered. Getting there, however, is never a simple task. A nursing administrator may gain feedback about a problem, but understanding why that problem is occurring and how, will require a well thought-out research approach. Researchers will need to figure out what data to collect, how to collect that data, how to turn that data collected into information, organize that information and then synthesize that information into knowledge relationships. The nursing administrator then can use those knowledge relationships to make decisions.

  The best place to begin looking for a good, solid research topic in nursing informatics is to interview nursing administrators and help identify problems that require investigation. Such topics might include helping nurses access patient information more quickly and efficiently, helping nurses access relevant information in a timely-manner to a particular situation, and identifying ways in which nurses can reduce errors during the patient-care delivery process. Research topics might also address challenges with integration of technologies or limiting system failures. Another topic of interest might include the ergonomics of information technology systems to help nurses better utilize systems to access vital data or even the evaluation of new technologies.

Consumer Health Promotion

• Promoting preventative health strategies is crucial to the nursing profession and often is a core aspect of nursing care. Consumer health promotion, when disseminated effectively and in a timely manner can help patients recover faster and help prevent deteriorating conditions. A nursing informatics researcher concerned with consumer health promotion will examine such topics as the best methods for synthesizing and delivering consumer health information, the best technologies to deploy to deliver consumer health promotions or research how and what consumer information is collected in relation to communicating with the patient.

Using Information Technology for Education

• Training members of the nursing staff to utilize technology to better aid care provided is of crucial importance. If nurses find the systems utilized a burden, rather than a help, then the systems will be of little use to health care organization. Providing training for nurses, however, is never a simple process. With staffing shortages, staggered schedules and the fact that nurses are people, rather than machine oriented presents a variety of problems. Conducting research into how to best utilize information technology to further nurse training will help make sure nurses improve patient care delivery, while learning to use information on a regular basis and for the right reasons.

Nursing Informatics and Nursing Research

• Nursing informatics has a major impact on almost all other aspects of nursing research. One main area of research includes defining nursing data sets, nomenclatures and terminologies to better enable subsequent research efforts. In addition, nursing informatics research can help identify and improve such important topics as confidentiality, privacy and security of data as applied to both patient-care and to research projects. Other important topics include how to best organize data and present it for researchers working in the nursing field.