Nurses practice in a variety of roles within healthcare organizations, whether they may be public or private, inpatient or outpatient. RNs also may hold non-traditional roles in insurance corporations, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare device manufacturers, or software application vendors. RNs can practice clinically by providing direct patient care; they can hold management positions; and they can also support clinical nursing and patient care activities, such as the work done by informatics nurses.

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Informatics nurses are registered nurses with a clinical background, which is critical to understanding the workflow of clinical nurses as well as the working environment of the various care settings.

There are a number of different types of nurses in the informatics field. The American Nurses Association's (ANA) Nursing Informatics: Scope and Standards of Practice defines an informatics nurse specialist (INS) as an RN who has been formally prepared at the graduate level in informatics or a related field, and an informatics nurse (IN) as a generalist who has informatics experience but does not have graduate level education on the subject.

The ANA Scope and Standards of Practice have listed the major functional areas for informatics nurses, which include:

·         Administration, leadership and management - either directly with clinical informatics departments or in combination with other functional areas such as serving as project managers.

·         Analysis - using data to synthesize knowledge, inform decision support, and manage outcomes as well as taxonomies.

·         Compliance and integrity management - helping make sure organizations are meeting all the national laws and standards such as HIPAA, FDA, Joint Commission etc.

·         Consultation - serving both internally or externally as a resource.

·         Coordination, facilitation, and integration - serving as the translator between end-users and IT experts.

·         Development - translating user requirements into solutions.

·         Education and professional development - ranges from teaching the end-user to use a device or application to educating the next generation of nurses and the general public.

·         Policy development and advocacy - being an advocate for consumers, hospital units, and the institution as a whole; also helping shape policies and standards at the state, national and organizational level.

·         Research and evaluation - conducting research in a variety of informatics topics that impacts both caregivers and consumers.