Giddens - Concept 44: Technology and Informatics

Question 1

The staff nurse who uses informatics in promoting quality patient care is most likely to access data in the domain of

a. certified clinical information systems (CIS).
b. clinical health care informatics.
c. public health/population informatics.
d. translational bioinformatics.

Answer 1

ANS: B
Clinical health care informatics and the subset, nursing informatics, provides for the development of direct approaches to patients and their families which can be used by the staff nurse to promote quality patient care. Certified CIS refers to the tools for achieving quality outcomes, including electronic health records, clinical data repositories, decision support programs, and handheld devices—not the data. Public health/population informatics is the domain which relates information, computer science, and technology to public health science to improve the health of populations; this domain would provide data for the nurse working with communities. Translational bioinformatics refers to the research science domain where biomedical and genomic data are combined; it’s a new term that describes the domain of where bioinformatics meets clinical medicine, generally for health care research rather than direct patient care.