My final session of the day (while some others sneaked off for Gi & Tonic) was a panel entitled Nursing Informatics: A Historyof the future. The eminent panel consisted of; W. Scott Erdley, Marion Ball, Peter Murray, Susan Newbold and Karl Oyri.

Panel

After Scott’s introductions Marion Ball took over to present some ideas about where we might be going in the future. She suggested we are currently undergoing a revolution in health care and technology. She highlighted some of the previous speakers calls for informatics (and the skills to use the technology) to underpin all aspects of practice including educational curriculae (including the TIGER project (Addressing Information Technology Competencies in Curriculum and Workforce) in the USA).

Susan Newbold took over to present some history of nursing informatics over the last 20 or so years. She listed the top 30 titles informatics nurses use, showing the diversity of roles. She suggested how complex and confusing this can be for everyone. She closed with a set of questions asking who we are and how we can “get our arms around our profession”.

Kar Oyri spoke next suggesting that this conference is about the collection and processing of knowledge - Karl suggested we should start at the other end of the process and define watwe want to get from our data. He gave an insight into the ubiquitous enviornment. He argued that we need specialists in sensor and body area networks as in all other areas of practice. He sees Wirless Sensor Networks driven by tiny sensors as a way forward to provide monitoring and care to a new level. He descrbed some current research in his unit and suggested we will see a lot more of it in years to come. He also talked about patient owenrship of patient records with an added hypertext glossary to explain the medical terms. He also touched on classification systems and how a search engine can handle the classification of terms, and the implications of genomics, proteomics and micro array scanning.

Peter Murray then took over with some future considerations based on a scenario of a newly qualified nurse in 2010 adapted from a blog post by Dale Hunscher entitled “Resident Physician, 2010

This nurse would have constant contact via the technology - but have shorter attention spans & wonder why they can’t have constant contact. Moore’s Law will have moved on giving the power of todays high end workstations in a palm top or wearable computing. Suggesting that we need some scenaio planning for these and other future scenarios both optimistic and pessimistic from pandemics to trojans which wipe out all health records?

His possible futures will need changes to research and theoretical constructs and well as personal behaviours and these were raised as trigers for the discussion, which Scott then picked up some future planning from 20 years ago & tried to link this to issues speakers had raised before opening it to the floor.

Questions, Coments and Suggestions were welcomed.

The first was about having nursing in the title - is nursing informatics alive or should it evolve & can we drop medicine forever. Panel responses highlighted the fact that that this debate has gone on for years, & moving to interdisciplinary health informatics, or clinical informatics.

NI2006, nursing informatics, health informatics

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