Aged care nurses can drive e-health

Aged care’s first certified e-health nurse in Australia is calling on her counterparts to get the skills they need to provide care in the digital age.

Donna Barton, a registered nurse working as a health informatics manager with a Sydney-based aged care provider, has recently attained the Certified Health Informatician Australasia (CHIA), which was co-developed by Australia’s health informatics bodies HISA, ACHI and HIMAA.

As reported by Australian Ageing Agenda ahead of the program’s launch in July last year, the CHIA aims to demonstrate that health informatics professionals, such as clinicians, allied health workers, health information managers, nurses and ICT professionals, have the skills they need to carry out their role safely and effectively.

Ms Barton told AAA that cementing gaps in her knowledge was one reason she decided to get certified.

“It was also to show other nurses that this is a great new area of expertise that they can get into that’s needed in aged care,” said Ms Barton, the first nurse from aged care to qualify.

With the move towards e-health, Ms Barton said nurses needed to embrace new information and communications technology now so they could get the best outcomes for patients in any healthcare setting.

“You are trying to build a 21st century workforce, you will need nurses and carers that are competent in managing information, interpreting it and delivering the care in the e-health world.”

Health informatics

CHIA core competencies include ICT, health sciences, information sciences, management sciences, human and social context, and core principals and methods.

To date, 56 professionals have completed the CHIA exam. Successful candidates are represented in each Australian state and mainland territory and one comes from New Zealand. They work in a broad range of roles and include CEOs, academics, clinicians, nurses, public servants and health information and health IT managers.

Ms Barton has been a health informatics manager (HIM) for eight years and a representative with Nursing Informatics Australia, which is HISA’s special interest group for nursing informaticians, for six years.

She spent three months preparing for the test and said while it was challenging, the readings were stimulating, and could be applied to her job, for example in the area of policy development.

She described her HIM role as broad, covering change management, project management, policy development to ensure clinical workflow alignment, assisting with technical and functional documentation, undertaking training needs analysis and developing training material for end users.

She uses her understanding of clinical and operational procedure gained through many years working as an RN and works closely with clinicians, the IT department, clinical resources people and staff on the floor, to help identify and scope different software and new devices, she said.

“A nurse informatician or health informatician has an intimate understanding of clinical workflows, or the resident journey, along the continuum of care. You can work out how to use point of care delivery devices and technology.”

Nurses can drive e-health

As part of her call to action, Ms Barton said nurses, as the largest cohort of health professionals providing care 24/7, were well-placed to help drive e-health and its adoption, particularly in home care.

“Nurses will be playing major roles in facilitating and empowering people to be involved in their own care management,” she said.

Aged care nurses and carers need to be advocates for older people and their carers to help them access their health information by introducing them to the emerging technologies, she said.

That might include showing care recipients and their carers how to engage with technology for remote care, social inclusion, or self-monitoring and use wearable technologies or mobile apps, Ms Barton said.

The future environment will result in new roles for nurses and carers in aged care as the national eHealth record, e-medication management, and robotics, for example, take off, she said.

“Clinical staff have to understand all these things to be able to work with them and change the ways that they deliver care. It is a big change that we will see.”

For more information on the certification, visit the CHIA hub.