Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) is working to help the United States realize its 10-year goal of electronic health records for all its citizens. TIGER, which started as a grass-roots initiative, now involves over 70 professional nursing organizations, vendors, and governmental entities.

The TIGER Initiative aims to enable practicing nurses and nursing students to fully engage in the unfolding digital electronic era in healthcare. The purpose of the initiative is to identify information/knowledge management best practices and effective technology capabilities for nurses. TIGER's goal is to create and disseminate local and global action plans that can be duplicated within nursing and other multidisciplinary healthcare training and workplace settings.

-- Phase I of the TIGER Initiative engaged stakeholders to create a common vision of electronic health record-enabled nursing practice

-- Phase II of the TIGER Initiative facilitated collaboration among participating organizations to achieve the vision

-- Phase III of the TIGER Initiative is a call to action to our leaders, organizations and you! Whereby all stakeholders are charged with ACTION in the following crucial areas:

-- Standards & Interoperability

-- National Health IT Agenda

-- Informatics Competencies

-- Education and Faculty Development

-- Staff Development

-- Usability & Clinical Application Design

-- Virtual Demonstration Center

-- Leadership Development

-- Consumer Empowerment & Personal Health Records

Since 2007, TIGER has successfully brought together hundreds of volunteers in nine Collaborative Teams to address these areas listed above. The Alliance for Nursing Informatics (ANI), as the enabling organization for TIGER, has developed a communication plan to distribute the TIGER Call to Action Reports. We encourage the organizations that have been involved in the TIGER initiative to each develop their own communication plans. TIGER is now entering the Implementation Phase.

In 2009, TIGER will move forward to integrate the full set of recommendations from the reports of the nine collaborative teams into the nursing community along with colleagues from disciplines across the continuum of care. This will include:

-- Developing a U.S. nursing workforce capable of using electronic health records to improve the delivery of healthcare

-- Engaging more nurses in the development of a Nationwide Health Information Technology infrastructure

-- Accelerating adoption of smart, standards-based, interoperable, patient-centered technology that will make healthcare delivery safer, more efficient, timely, accessible, and efficient

The TIGER Phase II Executive Summary can be accessed at tigersummit.

On behalf of TIGER, ANI and each organization involved in this initiative, we hope that all participating stakeholders will establish long term goals and plans for their own members and other constituents to deliver the TIGER Call to Action Reports to the 2,9000,000 nurses practicing in the United States today.

About Alliance for Nursing Informatics

ANI, cosponsored by AMIA and HIMSS, represents more than 5,000 nurses and brings together 26 distinct nursing informatics groups in the United States. ANI crosses academia, practice, industry, and nursing specialty boundaries and works in collaboration with the nearly 3 million nurses in practice today. Visit allianceni for more information.

Alliance for Nursing Informatics
allianceni