Health Informatics in Nursing : Week 10 Health Policy

This week in Health Informatics it was my groups week to present our class facilitation on the topic of policies. When creating our presentation there was only one article from the learning activity that we were able to educate ourselves from. Before beginning our presentation I expected to read information based on nursing standards of practice. I was surprised to read about how health policies are enabling patient engagement in care by creating the appropriate tools which will allow them to incorporate information they find relevant to their health. I also learned new terminology such as ODL (observations of daily living) and HIT (health information technology). An interesting idea this article proposed was the integration of using mobile devices which had an app geared towards self monitoring by patients. Allowing clients the opportunity to report their own health data promotes patient centered care. Gunn (2012), states that this will “empower patients to take ownership of their own health and play an active role in their treatment” (p.238). The benefit of including this into the future of health care is that nurses will be able to monitor early warning signs and prevent adverse events from happening.

Based on this knowledge my group presented our class activity to our professor. Initially we were going to divide the class into groups of three based on different age groups: teens, adults and elderly and provide each with a specific case study. We were then going to have the class create examples of what types of information they would include into their ODL’s. Our professor geared us away from this idea and tried to have us think more around creating policies. Upon making these changes and presenting to the class, the students were successfully able to distinguish the main issue revolved around their age group and create health policies, which could be put in place to address these concerns. The teens were faced with the issue of health literacy, the adults were given a problem concerning security of health records and the elderly experienced confusion on working and accessing mobile devices. What is your stance on this? Do you think you could come up with a few health policies regarding these age related issues?

During our class lecture, our professor asked each group to define policy/ health policy/ public health policy. According to the World Health Organization (2013), “health policy refers to decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific health care goals within a society” (p.1). We were then asked to create our own definition of this term. Upon thinking and using my resources I formally came up with the definition as, the strategies and guidelines that are to be implemented into the health care system that result in an improvement in patient outcomes. If you had to come up with a definition of health policy what would it be? Nurses should be concerned about health policy issues because patients are our priority, we are their primary caregivers.

Although there seems to be many benefits to electronic health records in the future, the setbacks have me wondering what can be done to address these issues. One must consider how these electronic records will be accessed and by who, the privacy concerns and the education and training that would be required when new patients are learning to use these devices. Is making this possible really beneficial? Here is a video clip from YouTube where a woman named Regina Holliday explains her views on patient access to health records and how she believes it could save lives.