In 2004, former President George W. Bush set a goal that most Americans would have electronic health records by 2014. There was a Health Information Technology Summit held by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the federal entity created to administrate the EHR program. During the summit, leading medical groups from across the country met to discuss strategies to help the country achieve the EHR adoption goals. However, in this summit nursing was not represented. But consider this, nurses represent the largest healthcare occupation, and they were left out of this summit.
However, there were about a dozen brilliant and motivated nurses who then informally met to discuss how they could support around this objective. This initial meeting of these grass root forward thinking nurses laid the foundation for an organization called the TIGER Initiative (Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform). This beginning movement was developed to further the nursing profession to better understand and bring into practice informatics tools, principles, theories, and practices that make healthcare safer and more effective, efficient, patient-centered, and equitable for all stakeholders. Today, the educational resources and materials are now including other disciplines, such as pharmacy.
TIGER began as a grassroots initiative in 2006. It was financed initially by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and supported by efforts from at least 70 organizations. The initiative had several phases in its development. The program continues to grow and is now in its phase III development with an international TIGER group.
Nursing Professionals continue to redefine the TIGER program and most recently research has been done to increase the competencies for the TIGER initiative to at least 24. (Hubner, et al., 2018). However, in a recent research survey it was found that 98% of the participants who already have high a technology background stated a need for further training to continue to implement the electronic and digital technologies in to practice.
The TIGER Initiative is a program that all nursing participants should continue to monitor and to be informed of the growth and implementations that are planned to better improve health care.
References
Hübner, U., Shaw, T., Thye, J., Egbert, N., Marin, H. F., Chang, P., O'Connor, S., Day, K., Honey, M., Blake, R., Hovenga, E., Skiba, D., & Ball, M. J. (2018). Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform - TIGER. Methods of information in medicine, 57(S 01), e30–e42. https://doi.org/10.3414/ME17-01-0155
obst, S., Lindwedel, U., Marx, H., Pazouki, R., Ziegler, S., König, P., Kugler, C., & Feuchtinger, J. (2022). Competencies and needs of nurse educators and clinical mentors for teaching in the digital age - a multi-institutional, cross-sectional study. BMC nursing, 21(1), 240. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-022-01018-
TIGER. 2022.An Initiative for Technology and Health Informatics Educationhttps://www.himss.org/what-we-do-initiatives/technology-informatics-guiding-education-reform-tiger