The Language of Health Informatics Essay Example

The Language of Health Informatics Essay Example The Language of Health Informatics Paper The Language of Health Informatics Paper Preferred language style: English (U. S. ). For this case assignment, you will be assuming the role of a lead person on a technology review committee at a multi-facility regional hospital. Your committee has been tasked with evaluating the plausibility and possible selection of a new health information system that will enable the hospital to electronically collect and share patient medical history information among its various hospital centers and departments. Currently, each hospital center maintains paper copies and files of patient records, which are separately managed and stored at each facility. Very few of the electronically based information system are integrated between the various centers and locations. To add to the challenge, the CIO informs you that most of the members on the committee have very limited experience with information systems and databases. However, the CIO is aware that you are studying health informatics, so she has asked you to help familiarize the committee with fundamental concepts related to databases systems and relevant health information standards. Specifically, the CIO (and your professor) requests that you prepare a two (full) page paper for presentation to the committee that provides a good overview of the following: Fundamentals of database characteristics and structure. Various types of medical data and information records relevant to this project. The importance of uniform terminology, coding and standardization of the data. Various information standards and organizations that may be applicable, and possibly required, for this project. Remember, your committee is mostly comprised of clinicians and other healthcare practitioners. Accordingly, they do not have a great deal of technical knowledge related to information systems. Introduction The objective of this project is to create a new electronic patient management health information system in order to handle the flow of patient information. This system is to basically enter process, store, modify and transmit the patient information. The current system is a manual one, in which the data is hand written down and stored in the form of hard copies. A lot of hassles are experience with the current system. Hence, it is proposed to shift to an electronic system. Fundamentals of database characteristics and structure The health information system database seems to be highly specialized functional and structural units integrated in a particular hospital environment. The system not only helps to manage the processes but also helps in the functioning of the hospital. The data is collected from the patient entry system or from integration with other networks. It then passes through the internal network for use by the various staff units including patients, laboratory, clinical, nursing units, intensive care unit, pharmaceutical, management, administrators, etc. The database would be performing several functions including processing and storing medical data, ensuring that certain quality standards are met, reporting costs and ensuring that cost-effective strategies are followed and also providing templates and forms for medical entries. Several functions such as quality control, resource handling, administration, etc, are taken care of by the database. The health information system would convert the data entered into information using the computational devices. The information can be stored and used.