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Child welfare informatics: a new definition for an established practice.

Article Excerpt
Child welfare, one of the most important arenas of social work, has benefited from advances in information technology in the past two decades (Weaver, Moses, Furman, & Lindsey, 2003). This whole discipline of social work can be captured best through the term "child welfare informatics." Although the term "informatics" may be new to the field of child welfare, it has served the health care field well for many years. The first federal funding of health informatics began in the late 1960s through the precursor of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Fitzmaurice, Adams, & Eisenberg, 2002). There has been an extensive examination of the different fields of health informatics, medical informatics, public health informatics, and nursing informatics (Staggers & Thompson, 2002). In fact, the basis of many social work practices that have combined information technology, social work research, and best practices through areas such as evidence-based practice have their origins in the health sciences fields (Gilgun, 2005).

What is informatics? Staggers and Thompson (2002) provided the following definition, which is specific to nursing informatics but can be generalized to any of the health informatics fields:

Nursing informatics is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice. Nursing informatics facilitates the integration of data, information, and knowledge to support patients, nurses, and other providers in their decision-making in all roles and settings. (p. 260)

The field of informatics developed because of the recognition of two significant factors (Rosenbaum Burke, Benevelli, Borzi, & Repasch, 2005): First, a report by the Institute of Medicine noted that thousands of patient deaths a year could have been avoided through more advanced and detailed use of health information (Rosenbaum et al.). Second, there is strong evidence to suggest significant socioeconomic disparities in the outcomes of health care, thereby making...

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