At my place of employment, we are lucky enough to be able to
serve over 3 million patients, meaning we have access to many
different forms of healthcare technology. With the number of
employees that it takes to run a system this large, it is not surprising
that all of the departments use healthcare information technology in
different ways. With nurses being the most abundant health
information technology users (Zadvinskis, 2018), their roles and
functions will vary between industry and setting of employment.
Each company within different industries will have standards
for its employees to meet, and healthcare is no exception to this. An
Occupational Health nurse, also known as an employee health nurse,
is a nurse who recognizes and prevents health issues in an
occupational setting. They also assess workers’ health in regards to
their job duties (Gaines, 2020) and promote the health and wellbeing
of employees. An occupational health nurse will be using healthcare
information technology to monitor the employees under their care,
but will not be using the technology to treat illnesses from non-work-
related exposures. This differs from a clinic nurse, who frequently
uses technology to assist the physician with diagnostic and treatment
efforts for patients due to a wide variety of exposures.
Another example of this would be a surgical nurse. Due to
working with them frequently at my job, I am very familiar with their
job duties. These nurses do not use healthcare information
technology to diagnose or treat patients, but they will use it to
document procedures done during surgery and to document all
timings and equipment used during surgery for billing purposes.
The wide variety of roles that a healthcare information
technology user can hold is vast but properly obtaining and storing
patient information is a priority for all health information managers
regardless of the actual position they hold. With the nature of
technology, it is changing often to meet the needs of the users and
the people it serves. This requires frequent updates and training in
protocols with every change to a system to ensure the proper care
and management of patient information is taken.
References
Gaines, K. (2020, June 10). How to Become an Occupational Health
Nurse. Nurse.Org. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from
https://nurse.org/resources/occupational-health-nurse/
Zadvinskis, I. M., Garvey Smith, J., & Yen, P. Y. (2018). Nurses’
Experience With Health Information Technology: Longitudinal
Qualitative Study. JMIR Medical Informatics, 6(2), e38.
https://doi.org/10.2196/medinform.8734
