Nursing informatics. Applications for long-term care

Long-term care (LTC) settings, specifically nursing homes, have found it difficult to manage the regulatory process and provide quality resident care without computerization. Clinical information systems in the current health care environment, including LTC, need to provide five functions. These five functions are providing the legal record of care; supporting clinical decision-making; capturing costs for financial purposes; accumulating a database for administrative queries, quality assurance, and research; and supporting data exchange between systems. While computerization may have occurred in LTC, the application of the informatics concepts with nursing standardized languages and financial and database usage may not have occurred. To succeed in the current health care environment, nursing informatics concepts need to be implemented in LTC. As a result, the quality of care for older adults in nursing homes will be improved. The purpose of this article is to identify application for nursing informatics use in the LTC setting.