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What is Nursing Informatics?
Nursing informatics brings together clinical and technology expertise to streamline healthcare workflows. Discover if informatics is the right career for you.
A definition of nursing informatics
Nursing informatics is a specialty which brings clinical nursing judgment into how healthcare data and technology are designed, used, evaluated and governed. Its purpose is to help ensure digital systems support safe care, useful clinical workflows and sound decisions.
The field combines nursing science with information, computer and analytical sciences. What makes the field distinctly nursing, however, is the judgment nurses bring to the technology.
An electronic health record can flag an abnormal value. An algorithm can identify a pattern. A dashboard can show that outcomes are changing. But those tools cannot independently determine what matters most for a particular patient, whether a recommendation makes clinical sense or when a system may be getting something wrong.
That is where nursing informatics comes in. Nurse informaticists help shape healthcare systems so that data and technology remain accountable to the realities of patient care.
Nursing informatics keeps nursing judgment inside the systems increasingly shaping healthcare decisions.
What does a nurse informaticist do?
Putting nursing judgment into healthcare technology can take many forms. Nurse informaticists examine how information moves through healthcare, how clinicians interact with technology and how those systems ultimately affect care.
Their work commonly falls into four areas.
Improve clinical systems and workflows
Nurse informaticists may evaluate electronic health record (EHR) workflows, documentation processes and clinical decision support tools.
- Reduce duplicate or unnecessary documentation
- Improve how information is displayed in an EHR
- Evaluate alerts and clinical decision support
- Redesign workflows that create delays or extra work
For example, nurses may be entering the same patient information in several places during admission. A nurse informaticist can investigate why that duplication exists and help redesign the workflow so information is captured and used more effectively.
Real-world example
One health system’s experience shows how meaningful these changes can be. In a Duke University Health System quality improvement project, an EHR workflow redesign reduced average nursing documentation time from 162 minutes to 132 minutes per 12-hour shift three months after implementation. The project shows how informatics can give nurses time back by reshaping technology around clinical workflow.
Use data to improve care
Nurse informaticists can help turn healthcare data into information organizations can act on. Their work may include:
- Tracking patient safety trends
- Reviewing quality outcomes
- Identifying patterns in medication errors
- Finding opportunities for process improvement
Help implement healthcare technology
When an organization adopts a new system, nurse informaticists may contribute to planning, testing, implementation and staff education.
Their clinical background helps them evaluate a crucial question: Does the system work the way clinicians actually need it to work?
Help govern how information is used
Informatics work can also involve privacy, security, data governance, regulatory requirements and the ethical use of health information.
Nurse informaticists use nursing knowledge, data and systems thinking to make healthcare technology safer, more usable and better aligned with clinical work.
Why is nursing informatics important?
Digital systems now influence nearly every part of healthcare.
Nurses use technology to document care, administer medications, communicate with other clinicians, review test results, monitor patient status and respond to clinical alerts. Healthcare organizations rely on data for quality improvement, population health, staffing, safety and strategic decisions.
That importance is increasingly reflected in healthcare leadership. In the 2023 HIMSS Nursing Informatics Workforce Survey, 54% of respondents reported that their organization had either a Chief Nursing Informatics Officer (CNIO) or another senior nursing informatics officer. The presence of informatics nurses at the executive level reflects how decisions about data, technology and clinical systems have become organizational priorities, not simply IT functions.
When those systems work well, they can make important information easier to access and help clinicians work more effectively. When they do not, the effects can show up directly in patient care.
That is why nursing informatics asks a more meaningful question than simply, “Does the technology work?”
It also asks:
- Does it support patient safety?
- Does it make the workflow better or more burdensome?
- Is the information accurate and useful?
- Does it help clinicians make better-informed decisions?
- Could it introduce an unintended risk?
These questions become even more important as healthcare organizations adopt artificial intelligence and increasingly sophisticated analytics. Such tools can help identify patterns and support decisions, but they also introduce questions about data quality, privacy, accountability and when a recommendation should be questioned.
The value of nursing informatics is not technology for its own sake. It is using technology responsibly to improve care, workflows and decisions.
How does nursing informatics turn data into better decisions?
One way to understand the relationship between information and nursing judgment is through the Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW) framework.
Consider a simple clinical example:
- Data: A patient has a blood pressure reading of 170/90.
- Information: Several readings show that the patient’s blood pressure has been steadily increasing.
- Knowledge: The nurse interprets that trend alongside the patient’s condition, medications and other findings.
- Wisdom: Clinical judgment helps determine what the information means for the patient and what response may be appropriate.
Technology can capture the measurements, organize the trend and bring important information to a clinician’s attention.
But displaying information is not the same as understanding its clinical significance.
That distinction is fundamental to nursing informatics. The system can support the decision. Nursing judgment gives the information context.
Informatics can help turn data into knowledge, but nursing judgment determines how that knowledge should be applied.
What skills do nurse informaticists need?
Because the work involves clinical practice, data and organizational systems, nursing informatics requires more than technical ability.
Important competencies include:
- Clinical judgment: Understanding how technology-related decisions may affect patients and clinicians
- Data literacy: Interpreting healthcare data and recognizing meaningful patterns
- Systems thinking: Understanding how one change may affect multiple workflows, departments or outcomes
- Workflow analysis: Evaluating how care is actually delivered and where processes can improve
- Communication and collaboration: Working with nurses, leaders, technology teams and other stakeholders
- Change management: Helping people successfully adopt new systems and processes
- Governance and ethics: Considering privacy, security, accountability and appropriate use of information
These skills often have to work together. Changing a single EHR field, for example, could affect nursing documentation, physician workflows, pharmacy processes, quality reporting and the data an organization later uses for analysis.
Successful nurse informaticists understand both the system and the clinical consequences of changing it.
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How can nurses move into nursing informatics?
For nurses who witness where technology, data or workflows fall short in their own workplace, informatics can offer a way to take a more active role in improving them.
There is no single path into the specialty. Clinical nursing experience can provide a strong foundation because nurses already understand patient care, documentation, clinical workflows and the practical impact technology can have on day-to-day work.
Nurses may begin developing informatics experience through:
- EHR or technology projects
- Quality improvement initiatives
- Clinical education
- Data and reporting projects
- Workflow redesign
- Technology implementation teams
Graduate education in nursing informatics (an MSN, or DNP) can provide more structured preparation in areas such as healthcare data management, clinical information systems, interoperability, workflow optimization, governance and technology implementation. Professional certification may also become part of an informatics career path depending on a nurse’s education and experience.
Moving into nursing informatics means building on nursing experience with deeper skills in data, systems, technology and organizational change.
Keeping nursing judgment in the system
Nursing informatics may involve data, software and increasingly sophisticated technologies, but its value begins with nursing.
Healthcare needs professionals who can understand what the data says, what the technology is designed to do and what the realities of patient care demand.
As digital tools and emerging technologies play a larger role in healthcare decisions, nurses working in informatics can help make sure those systems remain useful, responsible and clinically sound.
Better healthcare technology still depends on people who know when to trust the system, when to question it and how to keep patient care at the center of the decision.
For nurses interested in developing that expertise, Herzing University offers nursing informatics pathways at the master’s, doctoral and post-master’s certificate levels.