SCENARIO: Assume you are a nurse manager on a unit where a new nursing documentation system is to be implemented.

SCENARIO: Assume you are a nurse manager on a unit where a new nursing documentation system is to be implemented. You want to ensure that the system will be usable and acceptable for the nurses impacted. You realize a nurse leader must be on the implementation team.

To Prepare:

Review the steps of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and reflect on the scenario presented.
Consider the benefits and challenges associated with involving a nurse leader on an implementation team for health information technology.
n preparation of filling this role, develop role description for a graduate-level nurse to guide his/her participation on the implementation team. The role description should be based on the SDLC stages and tasks and should clearly define how this individual will participate in and impact each of the following steps:

Planning and requirements definition
Analysis
Design of the new system
Implementation
Post-implementation support

ANSWER

Introduction

In today’s healthcare systems development and implementation, nurses are increasingly becoming involved in searching for better technologies, data, and ways of providing quality services (Verma & Gupta, 2017). Healthcare facilities are becoming aware of the importance of health IT and as such nursing roles have become wider in scope. Nursing roles are continually evolving as new technology emerges and it has necessitated the involvement of nurses in the development and implementation of the system. Involving nurses early in system development reduces issues related to interoperability and integration. The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a five-stage process that ensures the successful implementation of a healthcare information system (Verma & Gupta, 2017). It is essential to include nurses in all of the five stages to ensure its success.

Nurse’s Role in the Systems Development Life Cycle

Planning

This is the most vital stage of any systems project since it serves as a guideline that ensures completion (Verma & Gupta, 2017). This stage is particularly useful since it makes sure that successive stages are successful. The nurse’s role in this phase is critical since they are the primary users of the system. Their roles may include defining the problem and scope, providing options for possible solutions, conducting feasibility studies to ensure viability, scheduling project tasks, and initial launching of the system.

Analysis

This phase aims at evaluating the existing systems to give a clear picture of what is working and identifying problematic areas. As the end-users, the nurse’s role at this stage is to offer information on the benefits and challenges that they already experienced while using the existing technologies (McLeod, Hweitt, Gibbs & Kristof, 2017). Given their work nature and positions in the organization, they are better suited in identifying problematic areas relating to collection, assessment, storing, retrieval, and usage of both patient and hospital information. The nurse mimics the role of a system’s analyst at this stage.

Designing This stage involves developing and designing a system’s plan of how to enhance the current technologies based on the outcomes from the analysis stage. It identifies new and pertinent interfaces, hardware, software, databases, and their relations to the whole system. The nurse’s role is to propose specific procedures of systems…