Meeting the informatics needs of today's nursing students.

Today's nurses must be well prepared with informatics skills in order to work more efficiently and safely in this world of evidence-based practice and consumer health. Competency based education provides the mechanism to measure selected skills at various levels and provides a standardized framework from which educators can plan appropriate learning activities. Informatics competencies have been developed for various levels of nursing, but none have been developed that level the educational preparation of the students or are designed to meet a cluster of identified courses. This paper will describe informatics competencies for nursing students across academic levels. The proposed integration plan can be used to identify informatics competencies for faculty and contemporary strategies to meet the informatics needs of today's nurses.