Nursing and Informatics for the 21st Century – Embracing a Digital World, 3rd Edition, Book 1: Realizing Digital Health – Bold Challenges and Opportunities for Nursing
2022 Productivity Press: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003054849
Chapter 2
Author: Whende M. Carroll
The 21st-century nursing care involves using new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of medical things (IoMT), Virtual and Augmented Reality and Cloud Computing, to transform how nurses deliver patient, family and community care and manage operations of systems across the care continuum in the age of digital health. Nurses are vital to developing, implementing, disseminating and sustaining new technologies in digital health with solid knowledge of these technologies and an innovative spirit. New technologies are steadily growing, explicitly considering the COVID-19 pandemic, and supporting healthcare costs for consumers as they continue to rise. Opportunities and challenges using new technologies are many despite their growing use in digital health. These include ethics, trust, information security, access to new technologies and health literacy, and digital health tools and technological interoperability. With the advancement of digital health, many opportunities are emerging for all nursing specialties, including informatics, to harness and transform established population health models that are functional and sustainable. To stay relevant in the ever-evolving digital health landscape, nurses must learn new skills to use digital health’s foundational new intelligent, connected and personalized technologies.