National Nurses United

Registered Nurse September 2009

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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. Ca n HI be fixe T helps p d so it atients i n s te a d h a r m i n g of them?

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