NR 361 Week 5 Discussion: Trends in Informatics (graded)
Hello instructor and classmates,
Healthcare is always changing and recently with the coronavirus the way we practice nursing in the outside of hospital like home health and hospice. Things have been a little different and we can still develop care to the patient. The advance in technology makes this possible. I chose tele-hospice because I am a hospice nurse. I learned that tele-hospice is under the umbrella of telehealth. “Telehealth most often involves an electronic connection to a geographically remote patient. The purpose of the connection is to deliver healthcare services. Under this umbrella term are the various healthcare professions and services, including telemedicine, telenursing, tele-social work, and tele counseling (Hebda et al., 2019).” Patients can be seen through virtual calls and assessed to prevent the spread of COVID 19. This is a way to deliver care and pt are very satisfied because they feel safe. Medications can still be delivered to their home and everything is done electronically. Healthcare has evolved so much, and services can be delivered faster. With everything there is pros and cons, but the advantage right now is that we can help prevent the spread of COVID 19. The legal and privacy can be violated and HIPPA is always a concerned if the patient’s information is hacked. Ethically we can provide safe care and respect the patient’s honors. Some patients do not have the capacity to use electronics and they are not fortunate enough to have families that can assist specially at the end of life. Also depends on your economic status if the patient has a telephone or a device to provide a telephonic visit. There is room for innovation and improvements to be done so that this can help deliver safe and faster care. I enjoy to see how technology keeps improving.
Reference:
Hebda, T., Hunter, K. & Czar, P. (2019). Handbook of Informatics for Nurses & Healthcare Professionals 6th edition. Pearson. New York, NY.
Smart pump is a bedside technology designed to alert the nurse if a rate is outside of the set defined parameters during an intravenous medication infusion (Hebda, Hunter & Czar, 2019). Smart pumps are a new generation of infusion pumps that can reduce infusion related adverse drug events and improve workflow; it has come a long way from the basic infusion pumps that allowed the nurse to enter limited information, such as the infusion rate and the volume to be infused and not to mention the need for manually calculating the rate of infusion. The basic infusion pumps were risky as it allowed for a wide range of medication programming with no alert system, this led to patients receiving lethal doses of medications. With great advancement in technology, smart pumps contain electronically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) software that can be customized to the hospital’s specific unit or speciality department (Proctor, 2014). A built in drug library and dose error reduction system (DERS) programmed into the smart pumps has significantly improved the safety of the delivery of IV medication therapies; the drug libraries and the DERS alerts the users if the calculated infusion rate exceeds the normal dosing limits.
Although smart pumps have become indispensable and holds great potential to reduce human error will only be as great of a potential so long as the nurses are ensuring that the right medication is being infused.The heparin overdose case of actor Dennis Quaid’s twins comes to mind where the nurses involved couldn’t recall looking at the dosage on the heparin bottle and infused 1,000x the prescribed amount to the newborns subjecting them to a near death situation. Nurses are also held accountable for ensuring the correct infusion rate by manual calculation.
References:
Hebda, T., Hunter, K., & Czar, P. (2019). Handbook of informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals (6th ed.). Pearson.
Proctor, L. (2014). Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare. From Smart Pumps to Intelligent Infusion Systems – The Promise of Interoperability. Retrieved from https://www.psqh.com/analysis/from-smart-pumps-to-intelligent-infusionsystems-the-promise-of-interoperability/