Nursing Informatics Integration into Mainstream Health Informatics

Nursing Informatics emerged in Australia during the early 1980s and drove the Professional development and acceptance of Health Informatics. Milestones achieved include the development of a national journal, the establishment of the Health Informatics Society of Australia and the Australasian College of Health Informatics (now collectively the Australasian Institute of Digital Health), nursing participation in Health Informatics standards development activities, adoption of the HL7 messaging standard, the delivery of numerous workshops, an annual national health informatics conference since 1993, hosting international conferences, the development and delivery of Health Informatics post graduate programs and establishing a research centre where the first prototype for an archetype repository was developed. This became the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager. The most recent milestone was the establishment of a private company that became a Registered Training Organisation. Continuing challenges include workforce capacity building to address the poor understanding of the need for improved data and IT governance at every level, the need to comply with proven scientific and technical principles and a need to transform national and international traditional infrastructures no longer fit for purpose to enable adequately support for global sustainable digital health ecosystems. Desired personal and aggregate data supply chains must be taken seriously and be supported by the best available technologies. Our collective biggest challenge is to improve multidisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration, semantic interoperability and optimum digital support to maintain global public health.