IV
Part IV
Nursing Values and Resistance
Use of any hospital technology must be consistent with safe, therapeutic, and
effective patient care. Health information technology is a complete unknown in
this regard. It's an enormous social experiment designed by computer scientists
and implemented by hospital administrators. HIT hasn't grown organically
from the needs of patients but has been imported from other industries.
Known as enterprise resource planning, it's adapted from similar technology
designed to manage business operations on a massive scale and already being
used to run the world's largest corporations.
Caring for patients isn't business. It requires compassion, judgment, and
advocacy. Because RNs have the moral right and legal duty to advocate for
patients, they have to be able to override the automated decision-making of
HIT designed to serve business interests.
RNs have to work collectively to control health information technology
rather than trying to fix it. It's important to recognize that tinkering can't
fix HIT because its primary purpose is to mechanize, or routinize, patient
care. It's designed to quantify the unquantifiable, to replace the patient with
an imaginary statistical norm. High-quality healthcare can't be mechanized
because it depends on people—on patients and caregivers—and people are
infinitely more complex and capable than computers can ever be.
© Copyright IHSP 2009. All rights reserved.
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