How can CNIOs (chief nursing informatics officers) advance their IT mission of organization with nurses? Make certain they have a powerful connection with the chief nursing officer, offer nurses a seat at the IT planning table, volunteer for projects that are not essentially in the CNIO job description, and simply stay visible, states award-winning CNIO Mary Beth Mitchell, RN, of Texas Health Resources.
“You have to advocate for your consumers,” she states. “When I was a nurse, my sufferers were my consumers, and now, the nurses are my clients. It does not mean they get everything they want, but it does mean I am out there listening to my customers and replying to them. You cannot merely sit in an office and do this job.”
Mitchell’s latest honor is the HIMSS 2015 Nursing Informatics Leadership Award, to be depicted at March 3 at this year’s HIMSS Conference and Exhibition in the place of Las Vegas. She oversees nursing adoption, utilization and optimization of the agency’s Epic EHR, as well as other information technologies utilized by the nursing staff.
Mitchell is THR’s 1st CNIO and has defined the character in a way that sets the bar high. During her tenure, THR has been identified as an EMRAM Stage 7 agency by HIMSS Analytics, and has acquired HIMSS’s Davies Award for utilizing health IT to substantially make better sufferer outcomes while acquiring return on investment.
All that victory has come straightly from good communication. Mitchell assumed the CNIO role in the year 2010 after working nearly fifteen years in other roles at THR, along with a 2-year stint at Tenet Healthcare. She spent her first two months on the job merely discussing to nurses and finding out their IT-related pain points.
When she heard consistent complaints about the form utilized for taking admission histories, she convened a team of nurses, 1 from each of THR’s hospitals, to meet with the IT staff once a week for 6 weeks at THR’s corporate offices to redesign the form and its regarded workflow.
“At the end of the 6 weeks, the nurses stated, ‘we have other things to work on!’ ” Mitchell claims. “So I went back to their CNOs and claimed, ‘Let’s do another 6 weeks.’ ”
5 years later, the group—now called as the Nursing Informatics Council—is still meeting 1 day a month. Mitchell no longer runs the meeting, having given it over to one of the 5 nurse informaticists who work for her, and it has expanded to nearly 30 persons, involving representatives of specialty places such as respiratory therapy and pharmacy. Few members attend by phone if their schedules are too busy, but Mitchell considers that meeting in person has much value.
“Everyone [in IT] knows that when they are designing something, they have to run it by the Nursing Informatics Council,” Mitchell states. “The council does all the testing and experimentation, and in return they also advocate for the latest technology” with the nursing staff in their institutions.
The Nursing Informatics Council also acquires suggestions from numerous ad hoc groups for special areas such as mental health and neonatal intensive care.
Mitchell has a seat on THR’s CNO council, where she keeps the system’s nurse executives informed about the development of information technology project that impact their staffs, and writes IT plans for them to approve.
Mitchell and her staff also present often at THR’s Nursing Congress, a team of about 150 that involves staff representatives from each hospital as well as a number of specialty areas. The Congress meets every other month to explain problems related to nursing.
She recently utilized that meeting to indicate an inpatient portal that had been unenthusiastically acquired at its 2 pilot sites. She got useful feedback on which features the nurses thought would be most significant to their sufferers and which ones were not performing as well as they required to.
Occasionally Mitchell has to elbow her way into a project to advocate for interests of clinicians. For instance, she is assigned herself to work on secure messaging project of THR, ostensibly run by the information technology department.
“The more tasks I can put my hands on, the more things I can influence,” she states. “You have to be willing to enter in and recognize opportunities, emphasize yourself, take the bull by the horns. If they do not need you there, they will tell you.”
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