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The Inclusion of Nurses in the Systems Development Life Cycle

SDLC stands for systems development life cycle. It is a way to deliver efficient and effective information systems that go along with the business plan of an organization. There are four major phases of a SDLC: the planning phase, the design phase, the implementation phase, and the maintenance/evaluation phase (Laureate Education, 2018). The most important phase of a SDLC is the planning phase in which the needs of an organization are identified.

The SDLC process is like the nursing process, in which the nurse must assess, diagnose, plan, implement, evaluate, and revise (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018). It has often been said that nurses are the heartbeat of a healthcare organization. This is even true regarding incorporating nurses into the process of the SDLC. As a result of the role and the function of a nurse, it is important to have them a part of the SDLC process because they understand the clinical flow and patient care process better.

Nurses play an effective role when it comes to information systems used such as admission, discharge, order entry, clinical documentation, communication system and critical pathways which require guidance from the clinical skills and assessment that nurses carry.

One of the reasons why nurses should be a part of the SDLC is because if there is software being developed and/or used in the clinical setting, then who better to be a part of the process and developing, teaching, and understanding the software…nurses.

Preventive care and maintenance are major components of the clinical setting and quality care in healthcare would be exceedingly difficult if nurses did not take the lead in being a part of the life cycle. As nurses are familiar with training strategies, it is helpful in the dissemination, practical application, and even revision of device learning activities. Nurses would be able to think critically to troubleshoot what is defective.

Nurses’ existence in the planning phase is so important because the nurse can be able to assess, using clinical skills, the necessary and anticipated needs for the organization and incorporate them into the nursing process to better ascertain the needs of the organization.

Nurses having an active part in the design phase is crucial. Imagine using an EHR to document on your patient and cannot because the nurse’s clinical insight was not considered in knowing what key markers to put in place to have a thorough assessment.

The implementation phase is enormously important to have a nurse involved in because what if it does not work, then the nurse would have to evaluate what went wrong clinically and offer a different approach and how to incorporate it. The overall goal in healthcare is patient satisfaction and quality assurance which is why these areas are constantly being fought.

If software can be created to ensure that these areas would be the perfect goal, then the nurse’s job is done. Lastly, the maintenance/evaluation phase is important for nurses to be a part of because once the software is implanted, you need to know if it is working and if it is not then what can be done to change it to make the software more user friendly and allow for the most accurate documentation in healthcare. For example, the admission assessment in most software includes various questions for the clinical staff to get the full picture of the history of the patient leading up to the current diagnosis and problems that need to be treated.

How a patient is treated depends on their healthcare history and what will work for their diagnosis right now. There are times when patients come in with many comorbidities and exacerbated conditions on top of why there are even at the hospital, and it takes the admission history to help navigate in how to treat the patient along with labs and diagnostic test.

During my time at the hospital I work, I have not been included in the decision-making process of new health information technology systems. The impact of not being included in the process, as stated above, will affect the quality of the patient care because there will not be certain types of documentation within the EHR, that lies under the clinical assessment of a nurse of a nurse (Verma & Gupta, 2017). If a SDLC was more business-based vs clinically based then it would be exceedingly difficult to understand the actual care that is being provided to a patient, which would be problematic during the most medically unstable and uncertacgoin time of a patient’s life.

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