The Inclusion of Nurses in the Systems Development Life Cycle

The Inclusion of Nurses in the SDLC
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The Inclusion of Nurses in the SDLC
Nurses play significant roles in designing, developing, and implementing a new health information technology (HIT) system. They are the majority stakeholders who should be fully engaged and included throughout the system development life cycle. The failure to do that might lead to unsuccessful HIT system implementation in a healthcare organization. The primary phases of the system development life cycle (SDLC) include the planning, analysis and requirement, design, development, integration and testing, implementation, and operations and maintenance (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017).
The planning phase involves finding out the problem scope and determining the right solution. When system developers are sent to a health organization to analyze and gather resources required for developing HIT, they should interact with nurses (Strudwick et al., 2019). Caregivers are the significant system users whose involvement in this stage is critical to understanding how the system should work.
During system analysis and requirements, the functional requirements or the solution that will be offered by HIT are determined. At this point, nurses should be involved to help system developers understand the need of the end-users (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017). Specifically, nurses are the significant users of the HIT system, and without meeting their needs in HIT, the system would be ineffective.
The third phase of the SDLC is the system design, which entails the description of the appropriate specifications, operations, and system features that will satisfy the functional requirements of a proposed HIT (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, n.d.). At this juncture, caregivers should give detailed explanations of their scope of the job and their daily activities so that system developers can determine the best way to meet users’ needs.
The development phase is what follows, which is the initial section of the actual system development. Nurses should be included to remind system developers how an effective system should perform based on their perspective. The interaction between caregivers and system developers ensures that an effective HIT is developed and that nurses understand how to use ...