Nurse informatics can help to collect data on a topic of interest and to help to evolve practices and improve outcomes. This is particularly helpful within the realm of nursing because there is grave importance in evolving policies and procedures used to reflect the most current research. Nurse informatics is described by the ANA as, “a specialty that integrates nursing, science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice” (ANA, 2001, Pg.17). Without nursing informatics, there would be little to no evolution of healthcare.
       A common scenario within the hospital is the high risk for readmission of patients shortly after discharge. Often times there are several unforeseen factors at play that can contribute to the patient being readmitted to the hospital within a 30-day window. This can lead to excess stress for patients and families with excess money and time spent. This can also negatively affect a hospital system by causing a shortage of beds within the hospital, profit penalizations, and poor reputation. As described by Silverstein et al., (2008) readmissions can be for a variable of reasons such as recurrence of the same chronic disease exacerbation, a complication from the last admission, an adverse drug reaction, an injury from health care, or premature discharge to a location or facility that cannot provide adequate services (p. 363). Elderly make up the largest population at risk for readmission, hence this is the population that research focuses on.
       Within this scenario, data could be collected from a large sample of the patient population over the age of 65 and those patients who were alive at discharge. The electronic health record can prove essential in the collection of this data by alerting those patients who have been readmitted within a 30-day time period following discharge. This data is reliable and gathered from an authoritative and credible source, as the EHR provides us with only objective, non-biased, impartial information (McGonigle