What is Health IT (health information technology)?

Running head: HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
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HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY1
Introduction:
With the global burden of the disease, ethical and effective decisions making has gained
increased attention in nursing practice for providing best possible care to the patients. In the
clinical setting, nursing professionals often experience high patient care demand (Rutledge et al.,
2017). In Singapore, approximately 35.5% of the medication errors observed due to a lack of
effective decision making. Therefore, effective decision making is a fundamental part of the
nursing practice which means nursing professionals must acquire skills for assessment of the
patient, deterioration of the patient, identify the adverse event (Ko, Wagner & Spetz, 2018).
Health information technology is one such effective means that can facilitate decision making.
This essay aims to provide one key factor that influences decision making and how it influences
decision making in part A and a description of one technology in Part B.
Part A:
Factor influence decision making:
The shortage of nursing professionals influences decision making. The shortage of the
nurse is one of the most of common factors experienced by the nursing professionals (Nesheva,
2019). The underlying reasons behind nursing shortage include an aging population with an
aging population, lack of nursing professionals with skills and knowledge in a special field, lack
of potential educators and long shift hours and inequitable distribution of nursing professionals
(Nesheva, 2019). Consequently, existing nurses are required to work for additional work hours
which resulted in depression, burn out, absentees and lack of appropriate decision making.

HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY2
Influence of nursing decision making:
Due to shortage of nursing professionals, nursing professionals are required to work for
long shift hours under the stressful situation which may lead to fatigue and injury.
Consequently, since one nursing professionals are required to provide care 2 to 3 patients which
could be prevented with the adequate distribution of workforce, nursing professionals provide
limited time to communicate with the patient, assess the patient, identify the individual needs of
the patients and design appropriate intervention. It influences the clinical decision making of the
nursing professionals and consequently, it leads to high medication errors, negligence of the
care, patient dissatisfaction, longer hospital stays and readmission of the nurses and more
adverse events. Therefore, in order to involve in effective clinical decision making, nursing
professionals are required to seek the assistance of the health technology which can facilitate
care even in the shortage of workforce (Nesheva, 2019).
Part B:
Health technology:
In the clinical setting, a range of health information technologies are used for supporting
patient safety as well as improving the quality of care. The wearable device is one such health
information technology which facilitate the decision making of the nursing professionals. The
wearable devices and mobile apps are successfully transforming the health care industry by
improving the quality of the care (Haldane et al., 2019). In Singapore hospitals, the wearable
device is called ViSi Mobile (ViSi) and it is considered as the world’s first wearable device that
successfully provides an estimation of vital signs. Wang, Liu and Zhang (2017), suggested that
the wearable device, ViSi device is currently used in the San Diago that continuously monitor the