Nursing Informaticist & Quality Specialist FTE

Position: Nursing Informaticist & Quality Specialist 1.0 FTE
** FTE/Scheduled Weekly

Hours:

** 1.00 / 40 / 1st Shift (United States of America)
Monday-Friday, no weekends or holidays.
** PRIMARY FUNCTIONS
** Utilizes data, evidence-based practice, and quality improvement tools to coordinate and lead Waverly Health Center’s (WHC’s) quality improvement efforts. Serves as the clinical liaison between nursing staff, operational leaders, and the IT team. Ensures that EPIC workflows, documentation tools, and clinical applications support safe, efficient, evidence-based nursing practice. Participates in system optimization, training, data analysis, and clinical transformation initiatives throughout the organization.
** ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
** 1. Improvement Expert:
* Is a content expert, and remains current and well-informed on various process improvement tools, including but not limited to those associated with Lean, continuous improvement, sustainability, Joint Commission (JC), Root Cause Analysis, etc.
* Accepts the responsibility for defining and consistently pursuing own continuing education requirements.
* Remain current and well-informed on patient safety practices in hospital and clinic settings.
* Support hospital and clinic quality and patient safety initiatives through informatics solutions.
2. Improvement Identification:
* Proactively identifies opportunities for improvement and patient safety within the organization through various methods including but not limited to use of relevant data.
* Identifies, extracts and analyzes data, formulating recommendations for process improvement.
* Effectively prioritizes improvement activities to create patient safety in all patient care areas of the hospital and clinics.
* Actively reviews patient surveys/feedback to identify opportunities for improvement and ensure a positive patient experience.
* Serves as a regulatory expert for the hospitals and clinics and completes regulatory education with staff as appropriate. Rounds in departments to identify regulatory opportunities for improvement.
* Observes clinical practices and maps current workflows to identify inefficiencies or safety risks.
* Recommends evidence-based workflow improvements using EPIC tools.
* Ensures clinical workflows align with regulatory and quality requirements.
3. EPIC System Support and Optimization:
* Builds, tests and maintains EPIC clinical workflows (e.g. orders, documentation, care plans, medication administration).
* Participates in new EPIC module or upgrade implementations, including workflow design, configuration, and validation.
* Identifies issues within the EMR and collaborates with IT to troubleshoot, prioritize, and resolve tickets.
* Performs system testing.
4. Leadership and Collaboration :
* Champions change management strategies to ensure staff adopt optimized workflows.
* Participates in policy development related to documentation and informatics.
* Facilitates communication between nursing, providers, ancillary departments and IT.
* Attends department huddles and provides input towards current process improvement metrics.
5. Education and Implementation:
* Develops training materials, tip sheets, job aids, and competency assessments.
* Provide onboarding to new nursing staff on EPIC functions.
* Conduct unit-based and hospital-wide EPIC optimization sessions.
* Acts as a resource during go-lives, upgrades and major workflow changes.
* Effectively works with all areas including, Non-Clinical, Clinical and Practitioners, to implement improvements within the organization that result in long-term, sustained changes:
* Utilizes relevant data to determine priority of improvement efforts.
* Drives improvements through proactive collaboration with staff.
* Conducts root cause analyses on events or metrics with clear outcomes and process improvement at completion.
* Works with each department as-needed to standardize processes using evidence-based standard-of-work.
* Actively participates on appropriate committees to share information and implement positive change/process improvements.
6. Data Knowledge and Reporting:
* Remains current and generally informed on applicable state/federal/accreditation regulations on clinical quality data reporting requirements, including but not limited to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Joint Commission (JC), Iowa Healthcare Collaborative (IHC), etc.
* Remains current on, and maintains detailed knowledge of, the facility’s publicly reported quality data, including trends and benchmarking variations, in order to identify improvement efforts.
* Identifies and tracks indicators to effectively measure improvement and patient safety efforts.
* Becomes a content expert for measures associated with improvement and patient safety efforts.
* Maintains access to platforms needed to submit data to local/state/national organizations as directed based on facility participation.
* Submits data within defined time frames based on platform deadlines.
* Uses EPIC reporting tools to validate and track clinical outcomes
7. Systems…