History of Nursing Informatics Essay

History of Nursing Informatics Essay

History of Nursing Informatics Essay

Nursing informatics is the integration of science and information technology to enhance healthcare information and services. Look into the history of nursing informatics and get to know organizations that represented the nursing informatics field. Updated: 01/13/2022

Intro to Nursing Informatics

Imagine you are a junior in high school who is attending a college fair. A college recruiter asks you what you want to be. You answer honestly that you have no idea. You like computers, and you’re good at math, but you’re kind of interested in nursing. The recruiter suggests health informatics. He tells you that nursing informatics is a specialized form of health informatics. You’ve never even heard of that profession and decide to do some research on what it is and where it came from.

So, what is health informatics? It’s interdisciplinary because it’s a combination of information technology and healthcare. It’s the study of technologically-based healthcare software and hardware that’s used to facilitate and enhance patient care and outcomes. Furthermore, nursing informatics (NI) is a subspecialty of this field that rolls nursing science into the mix. It not only supports nurses, but also other providers, patients, and stakeholders in decision-making to ultimately enhance healthcare outcomes. Great! That sounds right up your alley!

History of Nursing Informatics

But wait, why have you never heard of it before? Let’s take a look. When was the beginning of nursing informatics? When computers began storing and managing our patient information in large amounts, health informatics was technically born. It was the 1950s, and it was starting to affect the nursing profession. In the 1960s the French first used the term informatique medical to describe healthcare informatics.

Nursing informatics became an official subdivision of healthcare informatics in the 1980s. The 80s! As a high school junior, you can’t help but think that was a long time ago, but for many in the healthcare field, it seems fairly recent. For nursing informatics, the 1980s was the growth-spurt decade which propelled it into the profession that it is today.

In the United States, the Capital Area Roundtable on Informatics in Nursing (CARING) is a group of nurses focused on the advancement of information technology in healthcare. It came together in 1982. Later, the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA) was founded in 1992 and merged with CARING in 2010.

In 1983, the first journal of nursing informatics went into publication. It was called Computers in Nursing then, but as of 2002 it was renamed CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing.

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) recognized nursing as essential to the further development of healthcare informatics and formed the IMIA/NI-SIG, Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group in 1982.

In 1989, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) began working on the development of a standardized nursing informatics language. Then the American Nursing Association (ANA) named nursing informatics as a specialty in 1992 and issued the first credentialing exam in 1995.

In Canada, the National Nursing Informatics Project was initiated by the Canadian Nursing Association (CNA) in 1998. It began identifying the defining characteristics of nursing informatics.

History of Nursing Informatics Essay