ABSTRACT

The field of nursing informatics (NI) has quickly gained popularity in recent years. Many early informatics programs sprung up organically out of a need to identify nurses who had an affinity for technology. These early informatics programs morphed over the years and in 1992 the American Nurses Association (ANA) identified nursing informatics as its own nursing specialty. It wasn’t until 2009, however, when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was signed into law, that we saw explosive growth in the nursing informatics field. It was this act that earmarked over $19 billion to drive adoption of “meaningful use” of the electronic medical record (EMR) (HIMSS, 2018). This historic adoption gave way to an integrated network of patient data that was once a fragmented paper process.