| Course | NU 725 Technology and Nursing Informatics in Advanced Practice |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 1 |
| Paper type | Informatics role analysis |
| Length | About 1,050 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | MSN |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NU 725 Unit 1
Following One Fall Risk Score From Bedside Entry to Staffing Decision: What the Informatics Nurse Does Along the Way
Student Name
Department of Nursing, Herzing University
NU 725: Technology and Nursing Informatics in Advanced Practice
Instructor Name
January 20, 2026
Following One Fall Risk Score From Bedside Entry to Staffing Decision: What the Informatics Nurse Does Along the Way
The Role, Defined From Professional Sources
The professional scope statement describes nursing informatics as a specialty that brings nursing science together with information and analytical sciences so that data, information, knowledge, and wisdom can be identified, managed, and communicated in practice (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2022). The definition has evolved from a focus on computers to a focus on the data-to-wisdom continuum, a shift traced by Staggers and Thompson (2002), who argued that the specialty should be defined by what it does with information rather than by the technology it uses. The ANA scope and standards describe the informatics nurse as working between clinical staff and technical teams, with responsibilities that include analyzing workflow, designing and testing the build, supporting implementation, and evaluating whether systems meet clinical needs.
Definitions of this kind stay abstract until they are tested against a real path that data travels. This paper follows one element, a fall risk score on a medical-surgical unit, and asks at each point what the informatics role contributes that the clinicians and the technical team would not.
The Element and Its Path
The element is the Morse Fall Scale score, a six-item instrument scoring history of falling, secondary diagnosis, ambulatory aid, intravenous access, gait, and mental status, with a total from 0 to 125 (Morse et al., 1989). On this composite unit, the score is recorded by the admitting nurse and every shift thereafter. It travels through five hops.
Hop 1: Entry at the Bedside
The nurse completes the six items in a flowsheet during the admission assessment. Owner: the registered nurse. What could go wrong: items answered from memory rather than observation, the gait item skipped because the patient is in bed, or the flowsheet copied forward from the previous shift. Who would notice: rarely anyone, unless a fall occurs. Informatics contribution: designing the flowsheet so the gait item cannot be completed without a choice of "not assessed, patient on bed rest," which makes a skipped item visible rather than silently scored as normal.
Hop 2: The Rule
A score of 45 or higher triggers a clinical decision support rule that places a high fall risk banner on the patient's header, adds a yellow wristband task, and proposes an order set with a bed alarm and hourly rounding. Owner: the decision support team, with nursing leadership approving the threshold. What could go wrong: the threshold may not suit the unit's population, and the rule may fire so often that nurses stop reading the banner. Informatics contribution: translating the clinical intent into the rule logic, testing it against real patient data before go-live, and monitoring how often it fires and how often the proposed order set is accepted.
Hop 3: The Unit Report
Each morning, a report lists all patients with scores of 45 or higher and whether a bed alarm is active. Owner: the charge nurse, who uses it to assign patients to rooms near the station. What could go wrong: the report pulls the most recent score, so a patient reassessed as lower risk after a fall may drop off the list. Informatics contribution: specifying which score the report uses, most recent or highest in 24 hours, based on what the charge nurse needs, and documenting that choice so it is not lost when the report is rebuilt.
Hop 4: The Quality Dashboard
Monthly, the quality department publishes the unit's fall rate, expressed per thousand patient days, alongside the proportion of fallers who had a documented score of 45 or higher. Owner: the quality analyst. What could go wrong: a score recorded after the fall, rather than before, makes the prevention process look better than it was. Informatics contribution: defining the time window so that only scores documented before the fall count, and explaining that definition to leaders who read the dashboard.
Hop 5: The Staffing Decision
Quarterly, nursing leadership uses the average proportion of high-risk patients to argue for sitters or additional nursing assistants. Owner: the nurse manager and director. What could go wrong: if scores are inflated by copy-forward or deflated by skipped items, a staffing decision rests on a number that does not describe the unit. Informatics contribution: auditing the underlying data quality before it is used for a resource decision, and telling leaders how confident they can be in it.
Where the Path Broke on This Unit
The value of following the path became concrete last spring. The quarterly staffing request cited a high-risk proportion of 62%, far above the hospital average. An audit of 50 records by the informatics nurse found that in 19, the Morse score had been copied forward unchanged for four or more consecutive shifts, including for patients who had been walking independently for days, and in 7 the gait item had been scored as impaired for patients on bed rest who had never been observed walking. When the audited scores were corrected, the high-risk proportion fell to 48%. The staffing request was still justified, but on a number that could be defended. The fix was not a lecture to nurses but a flowsheet change that stopped copy-forward for this element and a gait option for patients not yet observed.
What the Path Shows About the Role
Following the score makes the role visible in a way the definition does not. Clinicians own the entry, the technical team owns the build, and leaders own the decisions, but no one else is responsible for the data's meaning as it moves between them. At every hop, the informatics nurse's work was to preserve that meaning: making missing data visible, matching rule logic to clinical intent, defining which value a report uses, and checking data quality before a decision depends on it. This matches the sociotechnical view that health information technology problems arise from interactions among people, workflow, technology, and organization rather than from any one of them (Sittig & Singh, 2010).
The path also shows the role's limits. The informatics nurse does not decide the fall risk threshold, which is a clinical judgment, and does not write the report code, which is the technical team's work. The contribution lies between those responsibilities, which is exactly where the definition places it.
References
American Nurses Association. (2022). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice (3rd ed.). American Nurses Association.
Morse, J. M., Morse, R. M., & Tylko, S. J. (1989). Development of a scale to identify the fall-prone patient. Canadian Journal on Aging, 8(4), 366-377. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0714980800008576
Sittig, D. F., & Singh, H. (2010). A new sociotechnical model for studying health information technology in complex adaptive healthcare systems. Quality & Safety in Health Care, 19(Suppl. 3), i68-i74. https://doi.org/10.1136/qshc.2010.042085
Staggers, N., & Thompson, C. B. (2002). The evolution of definitions for nursing informatics: A critical analysis and revised definition. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 9(3), 255-261. https://doi.org/10.1197/jamia.M0946
What the NU 725 Unit 1 instructions ask for
The Unit 1 paper asks you to analyze the role of the informatics nurse or the nurse in informatics, drawing on professional definitions and the scope and standards document. Expect to define the specialty using authoritative sources, describe the competencies or functions the role carries, and connect them to a practice setting. Many versions ask how informatics supports safe, quality care or how the role works with clinicians, technical staff and leaders. Some ask you to interview or observe someone in the role. Check whether your section requires the ANA scope and standards by edition, since the 2022 edition changed some language. A concrete example from a unit is usually welcome, as long as it shows the role in action instead of restating a job description.
How this NU 725 Unit 1 example is built
The paper defines the specialty in its first section from the ANA scope statement and Staggers and Thompson's work on how definitions evolved, then sets the definition aside to look at practice. It chooses one element, the Morse score, and describes the instrument with its source. Five short hop sections follow, each using the same three labels: what happens, who owns it, and what could go wrong. That parallel structure keeps a long path readable. The audit section turns the abstract risks into a real event, showing how copy-forward behavior at the bedside distorted a staffing argument months later. The closing section answers the prompt directly: clinicians own entry, the technical team owns the build, leaders own decisions, and the informatics nurse owns whether the data means what everyone assumes.
NU 725 Unit 1 rubric: what full points look like
Herzing rubrics for a role analysis typically give points for defining the role with scholarly and professional sources, describing its functions and competencies, applying them to practice, and writing. Definition points require citations to the scope and standards or comparable authoritative work rather than a general website. Function and competency criteria reward specific activities, such as data validation or decision support review, over broad statements about technology. Application is often the largest criterion and earns full credit when the paper shows the role working in a real or composite setting. Some rubrics add a row on collaboration with other disciplines, which the hop owners address here. The final criterion covers organization, clarity and APA 7 references, including correct citation of the ANA document as a book.
Common NU 725 Unit 1 mistakes, and how to avoid them
Unit 1 papers most often lose points by describing the informatics nurse as the person who helps with the electronic record, which misses data, information and knowledge work. Another frequent problem is quoting the scope statement at length without applying it. Students also cite vendor or job board pages as sources for the role, which do not count as authoritative. A paper that lists every competency in the standards gives the grader nothing to evaluate; pick the few your example actually shows. Leaving out collaboration with nonnursing roles is a common gap. If you interview someone, describe what they do rather than quoting praise for the job. Finally, cite the correct edition of the scope and standards, because graders check the year against the language you quote.
Get a NU 725 Unit 1 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 1 instructions and the rubric from your NU 725 classroom, plus the role or setting your instructor named. We write a custom example against those instructions, with one data element traced end to end and the role mapped onto it, and return it in 24 to 48 hours. The first one is free.
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NU 725 Unit 1 questions, answered
Is nursing informatics just being good with the electronic record?
No, and papers that assume so lose the analysis criterion immediately. Using a system is clinical work. Informatics is deciding what gets captured, where it sits in the encounter, how it is defined, who may see it, what it feeds afterward and what happens when the definition changes. Those are governance and design decisions that continue no matter how skilled any individual clinician becomes.
Can I write about the informatics team where I work?
In many sections yes, and it produces a more concrete paper. Describe roles and reporting lines without naming the employer, the individuals or anything about specific patients, and do not reproduce internal documents or screenshots that your access obligations cover. Where you need authority for a claim about the role itself, cite published scope and competency material rather than internal policy.
What sources count as authoritative for the role?
Professional scope and standards publications, published informatics competency sets, peer-reviewed informatics literature and material from recognized professional organizations. Health system job listings, consultancy blogs and software vendor pages are useful for orientation and weak as support. Where a claim carries weight in the paper, put a published source under it rather than a page written to recruit or to sell.
Where can I find a free NU 725 Unit 1 sample paper?
This page has the whole NU 725 Unit 1 fall score paper free to read, all five hops plus the audit and the closing argument. If you would rather follow a different data element or interview someone in the role, a custom paper can be built on that.
What does an informatics nurse actually do on a hospital unit?
Much of the work is making sure data means what people assume it means. In this sample the informatics nurse audits fall risk scores, finds copied-forward entries inflating a staffing figure, and works with the unit and the build team to fix the cause.