Nursing Informatics, adoption resistance, and IT

[rwingo]

From http://blogs.bsti.com/healthcare/?p=21

Nursing Informatics, adoption resistance and IT
There has been a trend in the adoption of IT to pursue nursing informatics. There are several reasons for this:

• As a group that has been underserved by IT in the past, it is inevitable that market forces would turn the industry’s attention to nursing.
• The importance and considerable breadth of nursing in healthcare is being recognized.
• Nurses themselves have taken an interest in IT as a way to make their lives easier through automation.
• Facing resistance to adoption from physicians, healthcare administrators and the healthcare industry are focusing on a different group to advance the use of IT in healthcare.
• Nurses have an interest in IT, physicians tend to resist, so the path of least resistance points to a growth in Nursing Informatics.

The trend will continue, with the several effects:

• Positive case studies on the benefits of healthcare IT.
• Fewer nurses per patient population. This will result in easing labor constraints as the population ages and the patient population increases.
• Enable technology based benefits without forcing experienced, valuable physicians to adapt to what may be beyond their comfort zone.
• Allow time for IT resistant physicians to be replaced by younger, more tech friendly physicians.
• Healthcare IT staff will gain experience in implementing and supporting IT at a faster pace than currently is occurring.

IMHO, that's a pretty interesting perspective. However, it's been my experience that, despite their resistance to change, physicians, not nurses, seem to have much more political power/clout when it comes to influencing an institution's choices in information technology.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how we can improve nursing's influence on information technology selection and implementation?