Connecting for Care

If you have read the article included in our Module 2 called "Connecting for Care: Nursing and Health Information Exchange" by Judy Murphy, like me, you will recognize that we have a major role in the health care reform. This is in the area of standardization of nursing language in all health care settings as we continue our direction to the mandate of electronic health record by year 2014. Our role is beautifully written by Murphy (2010), "Now my message is this. Be the change you want to see in patient-centric care. Make sure you are embracing the challenges of interoperability and getting involved in solving them for your organization. Participate in the data exchange efforts in your state. Understand the standards involved in the meaningful use definitions. Get involved in the nursing efforts for standardizing clinical vocabularies and reference terminologies. Being able to share and compare data between health care organizations and across time is the right thing to do for our patients- both for the individual patient's quality of care and for the secondary use of analyzing data across patients to study the efficacy of our practice and how we contribute to patient outcomes".