Nurses' information management across complex health care organizations

Area of Science:

• Nursing Information Management
• Healthcare Informatics
• Patient Care Coordination

Background:

• Effective information management is critical for seamless patient care transitions between hospital and home settings.
• Existing discrepancies often exist between formal healthcare policies and actual nursing information practices.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe and analyze information management practices of hospital and home care nurses for patients requiring ongoing care post-hospitalization.
• To identify challenges and improvements in nursing information exchange during patient care transitions.

Main Methods:

• A prospective descriptive study involving 287 hospital nurses and 220 home care nurses.
• Data collected via questionnaires administered before and after the implementation of electronic patient records (EPR) for nursing documentation.

Main Results:

• Identified discrepancies between organizational policies and nurses' actual information management practices.
• Observed differences in information management assessments between hospital and home care nurses, which decreased post-EPR implementation.
• Highlighted technological issues, lack of integrated EPR systems, and differing practice models as barriers to complex information handling.

Conclusions:

• Electronic nursing documentation in EPR systems can improve information management consistency.
• There is a clear need to contextualize and customize information exchange between healthcare providers.
• Addressing technological and practice model differences is essential for optimizing patient information flow across the healthcare system.