The healthcare environment in which advanced practice registered nurses are currently practicing is a complex setting with rapid change underway driven by a need to transform the healthcare delivery system. The United States faces challenges with escalating healthcare delivery costs and questionable performance on many quality indicators for patient safety and overall population health. As an answer to these challenges, Health information technology (HIT) has been promoted as a critical element in the National Quality Strategy (NQS) to achieve three aims: better care, affordable care, and healthy populations and communities (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011). More recently, a fourth aim has been added to include care of the provider within interprofessional teams. This fourth aim was added because HIT is creating undue stress and the burden of documentation associated with the Electronic Health Record (EHR), often resulting in burnout. Nurses will play an essential role within interprofessional teams in transforming the healthcare delivery system and are critical team members for success, particularly related to the effective and efficient deployment of HIT. In the last 10 years, the United States has focused on laying the HIT EHR foundation established under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009. Now, the United States is focused on optimizing the investments made on Health IT EHR implementations and to address unintended consequences that have resulted from the rapid deployment of I.T. across the nation. This book consists of five sections. Section one provides a brief introduction to nursing informatics. Section two briefs on point-of-care technology. Section three discusses data management and analytics. Section four details patient safety/quality and population health. Finally, section five describes new and emerging technologies and is intended to provide the advanced practice nurse with a view for the future of healthcare-based informatics.
