Technology Opens New Doors to Nurses

By Michelle Angelique O. Parreñas

Newly named Commission on Information Communications Technology (CICT) chief Ivan John Uy suggested in an article by Yahoo! Southeast Asia Editors last August 12 that unemployed nurses reengineer their skills to become IT (Information Technology) - enabled medical transcriptionists through a three to six-month training.

A medical transcriptionist’s primary job is to write down dictated materials into clear and understandable texts for the purpose of charting information on patients. She is in charge of transcribing medical reports, discharge summaries, operative reports, therapy or rehabilitation notes, chart notes and hospital and clinic reports through the use of modern software and equipments.

In the aforementioned article, Uy said, “The basic skills are there, you just need to retool them and make them more IT-enabled. The lack of job opportunities for nurses in the country and abroad is an opportunity for the Philippines to fill in the demand for medical transcriptionists in the business process outsourcing industry.”

Regarding this proposal, Dr. Christian S. Dicioco, a well-renowned professor of Nursing Informatics (NI) at the UST-CON said, “Being a medical transcriptionist is definitely an in demand job right now but it would be better (for nurses) to focus more on their profession like NI and Nursing Research.”

Dicioco specifically noted the presence of NI in the local scene, “Since NI is a new focus and is gradually being introduced here in the Philippines, it would be favorable to utilize something that we already have such as the product of our nursing research here in the Philippines—Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS).”

NI deals with delivery, documentation, administration and evaluation of patient care and prevention of diseases with the support of nursing by information systems. It requires a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree and two years of clinical practice in addition to 1000 – 2000 contact hours at automated Hospital Information Systems. It is a multidisciplinary scientific endeavor of analyzing, formalizing and modeling how nurses collect and manage data, process data into information and knowledge, make knowledge-based decisions and inferences for patient care and use this empirical and experiential knowledge in order to broaden the scope and enhance the quality of their professional practice.

“Our rural health units (RHU) are in great need of nurses today. Imagine that there are 41,000 barangays here in the Philippines,” Dicioco said. “If one or two nurses were assigned in each potential RHUs, the unemployment rate would decrease two-fold.”

According to Dicioco’s book, Nursing Informatics here in the Philippines – First Edition, the CHITS used by the RHUs is a free open source software electronic health record system for local government health centers in the Philippines. It is an extensible, modular, open source information system for rural health units with the purpose of training them on electronic health records at minimal costs.

“It would be better for them to stay here in the Philippines, imbibe nursing as their job and help them gain basic experience in utilizing our technological advancement—both of which would be of mutual benefit for themselves and for our country,” Dicioco concluded.