Promoting patient safety through informatics-based nursing education

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Quality of Health Care in America identified the critical role of information technology in designing safe and effective health care. In addition to technical aspects such as regional or national health information infrastructures, to achieve this goal, healthcare professionals must receive the requisite training during basic and advanced educational programs. In this article, we describe a two-pronged strategy to promote patient safety through an informatics-based approach to nursing education at the Columbia University School of Nursing: (1) use of a personal digital assistant (PDA) to document clinical encounters and to retrieve patient safety-related information at the point of care, and (2) enhancement of informatics competencies of students and faculty. These approaches may be useful to others wishing to promote patient safety through using informatics methods and technologies in healthcare curricula.