
122 | CHAPTER 8 Nursing Informatics Roles, Competencies, and Skills
(EHR) allows the nurse to provide the best possible patient care.
Genomic health care and the interaction between genetic factors and
the environment require new understanding of the types of informa-
tion needed to make decisions, characterized as a “data tsunami”
(Bakken, Stone, & Larson, 2008).
Nursing recognized early on that computers would change health
care and became actively involved in shaping how computers were
used in health care. The American Nurses Association (ANA) first
recognized nursing informatics (NI) as a specialty in 1992 (Saba &
McCormick, 2006; ANA, 2008). The ...