Thinking back about digitalization in my field of work during my lifetime. What happened? Nursing was patient centered caring with dedicated nurses and their managers in the ward. Now, we have dedicated nurses behind the table with their computers trying to figure out the latest update of the electronic health record. Managers are filing reports of structured care plan in use to another manager who in the end will conduct a report how the nurse used the digitalized care plan to achieve the perfect structured care plan to the client.
As you can read from my text I am not very pleased how digitalization in my profession has changed the work and structure of the work. Idea must have been to help the care given to the client but it was noted how much information was to be found in the data nurses produce while implementing the care. Now there is no time to give the care as nurses need to satisfy the demand of nursing science to produce data.

Future of digitalization in nursing profession

My wildest idea would be no written notes or care plans. Client with their own personalized care pathway with nursing, medical and other interventions created for each patient group. A touch screen next to their hospital bed for easy and quick use for all staff. No complicated structured care plans, AI will formulate the required structure of nurses interventions from care pathways and bring reminders of the care tasks during day e.g change of intravenous lines, catheters, dressings. Medication lists will be automatically updated and formulated as well as information material brought to client data. Digitalization will assist with the tasks that can be done without human intervention and nurse can spend more time with human interaction. AI will be harnessed to do things in the background but client and nurse will decide how much and when.

Risks of open digital society

Risk are that your information leaks and sensitive medical information gets into wrong hands. I personally am not worried, I have nothing to be ashamed of in my medical records. Why should anyone? Why are we worried about things like that? Who cares if I had a plastic surgery or breast augmentation to enhance my looks when public demands it. Or suffer from mental illness and have been seeing a therapist for 12 years to talk about my childhood trauma. Perhaps if I have done something illegal I might think differently. Otherwise, I think laws are substitute of common sense. But then on the other hand the are less and less people with common sense.

Self-Evaluation

As I was reading all the material I realized how little do I know and how much more there is to learn. Is it all possible to do in just a few hours or is this more like a growing process. I definitely got the seeds now, just need to keep my ears and eyes open to learn more. Cannot wait for the next topics.

I have left my comments on Home – ZazaWorld (savonia.fi) and https://blogi.savonia.fi/homemadeketomama/

Suggest reading:
Li, Y., Rao, S., Solares, J.R.A. et al. BEHRT: Transformer for Electronic Health Records. Sci Rep 10, 7155 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62922-y