I started out early in informatics. My hospital bought an IBM Displaywriter in about 1981 that had a single disk drive for an 8-inch floppy disk. There were thousands of pages of manuals to operate the thing, but basically, all it could do was word processing and an elementary database. No one knew how to use it, so I started staying after work many hours and mastered it, so that I had eventually maximized its potential. I knew it was the only way I would survive as a quality assurance professional in a mega-hospital in NYC. I wrote programs that automated data crunching and reporting for the 33 nursing units I was responsible for. Learning to program using that machine was most helpful for later applications.
Since then, I have done all my work on PCs. Then, I moved West and work at a Federal hospital, and have been a nurse-leader in clincal informatics. It was my job to roll out bar coding of medications, vital signs, progress notes on line, etc. Our facility is just about totally paperless at this point. I started and maintain our nursing intranet site. We automated our glucose testing program, so I also manage aspects of that. I also developed and continue to maintain software related to the Federal systems for performance evals, job descriptions and competencies. I am supposed to start a redesign of that soon.....and I hope to implement a vital signs data capture project that has been too long delayed.
My latest and biggest challenge to date has been working toward Magnet Recognition. It was my task to write the application document, which we submitted electronically, of course. (It printed out to 15 inches of paper, stacked.)
I am just joining this today, but do not see much activity on this website. I am busy enough too to understand why, but hope to see active participation and mutual assistance with our projects.