36^th Global Nursing Care & Education Conference

Nurses are dependent upon data and information in their delivery of daily care to patients. Yet many do not realize that data and information are essential to the nursing process (e.g., assessing, diagnosing, planning, intervening and evaluating). In recent years, our healthcare environments have continued to introduce new clinical information systems that digitalize the data and information needed for patient care. With such systems, new challenges have presented themselves to nurses and healthcare professionals. One of these challenges is the ability to access, enter, store, retrieve, exchange and evaluate data while on the go. Nurses currently rely on pieces of paper to temporarily store the data and information they need for care each day.  The pieces of paper are not part of the patient’s medical record and are variable depending upon the nurse. With advancements in technology, we now have smartphone devices that are small enough to be portable in a nurse’s pocket. With such devices, software applications can be designed to address the data and information needs of nurses delivering care. Such applications will require interoperability with other clinical information systems to maintain a source of truth with the patient’s health record. Interoperability is a word used to describe the ability to exchange data between two or more systems. The term is often discussed in more technically oriented environments. Yet, the impact of such technical improvements will be essential for nurses in clinical care environments to strive toward continued improvements in the delivery of direct patient care.