Nursing informatics. Issues for critical care medicine.

The demands of today's health care arena have forced the issue of automation and computerization. Nursing, as the major stakeholder in the collecting, managing, processing, transforming, and communicating of information regarding the patient, has developed a new approach to these tasks. Nursing informatics, which is the application of computer science and information science, is being used to manage and process the data, information, and knowledge necessary in the discipline. Although still in its infancy, nursing informatics has started to have a major effect on health care information gathering and clinical practice despite the multiple barriers to its advancement. Critical care is a data-rich environmental that can benefit from better management and processing of the data derived from the critically ill patient. Nursing and medical informatics joining together to organize the data, coupled with the introduction of good DSS and the addition of information retrieval systems at the bedside and the on-line medical record, will have a positive effect on the critical care environment and on the critical care patient outcomes.