Nursing Informatics vs. Clinical Nursing: What’s the Difference
Careers in nursing offer multiple paths and areas of focus. For instance, take nursing informatics vs. clinical nursing. Both are concerned with patient care, yet they deal with distinctly different aspects of it.
Nursing Informatics: The Intersection of Technical and Clinical
Health care is becoming more data-driven, and the need for people with a combined background of patient care and information management is exploding. You can play a key role in putting health care technology to work for patients and the organizations caring for them.
In nursing informatics, you’ll support all the stakeholders involved with the health of a patient. That starts with providing good, clear information to patients themselves and extends to the medical care team and on to facilities and operations professionals, too.
How Is Clinical Nursing Different from Nursing Informatics?
As a clinical nurse, you apply your medical knowledge and patient care skills in hands-on roles assessing patient conditions, diagnosing, and treating conditions in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices. Your focus is on people.
In nursing informatics, your focus is on data and IT systems. You spend your time on information technology integration, data management, and the maintenance and analysis of electronic health records (EHRs). You contribute to decision support, both for the clinical and the business operations side of health care. You may work at clinical sites but could also work in a traditional office setting for consultants and informatics specialty companies.
Do nurse informaticists care for patients?
Working in nursing informatics, you typically won’t care directly for patients. Instead, you’ll apply your medical knowledge to analyzing data and building systems that help others uncover insights in data. Maintaining complete and accurate health records is part of the role, as is tracking pharmaceuticals, clinical outcomes, and other kinds of health data. Although you won’t care for patients directly, your work is vital to improving patient outcomes.
Do you need to be an RN to be a nurse informaticist?
Getting a start in a nursing informatics career typically requires that you be an RN. Nursing expertise helps you to use health care technology to its fullest and to effectively function as a liaison between the technical and the clinical. However, many organizations may require additional education, like a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and a master’s degree.
Can you work from home as a nurse informaticist?
Nursing informatics is one of the few areas in nursing where working remotely and from home is possible. Whether you work for a health care institution like a hospital, a data consulting company, or a software developer, your work is largely done on a computer. You can work anyplace you can get a secure and reliable connection to data and IT systems.
Which Degree Is Right for Your Career Goals?
The place to start your career is to earn your nursing degree. Excelsior’s associate degree and bachelor’s degree program in nursing prepare you to pass the NCLEX-RN exam, which is necessary for getting licensed as an RN.
You may then wish to explore multiple career paths in nursing to make sure you understand your options to find the right fit for you. If you think you may be interested in becoming a specialist in nursing informatics, you will likely need a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and, if you want to advance, a specialized graduate degree.
The Master of Science in Nursing Informatics at Excelsior offers a robust curriculum that prepares you to make the best use of data in addressing health care challenges, improving patient care, and optimizing operations. The program gives you the right blend of advanced nursing science, data science, and information technology expertise for exciting roles in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, research laboratories, insurance agencies, consulting companies, and more.
Working in nursing informatics is the ideal career for you if you love technology and have a strong interest in life sciences and helping people. Technology in the field of health care is evolving fast, opening well-paying opportunities at the beginning of your career and chances to grow as you progress.
