Essay on Modern Healthcare Informatics: Leveraging ICT for Quality Care

In the modern-day, there is a widespread application of information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and has been implemented in various aspects of life, including the healthcare sector. Healthcare informatics was established to make use of the internet towards offering better healthcare services. This healthcare informatics encompasses the interaction between people, process as well as technology in an attempt to facilitate operations and help the management towards providing quality healthcare services.

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In the healthcare organization where I work, general practitioners have been successfully using Health Information Technology for years, but the regular employment of these technologies is somewhat old-fashioned to some extent hence most intended benefits remain subtle. However, the organization has recently invested in more extensive and more sophisticated technologies such as the electronic health records (EHR) and electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) systems. With these transformative technologies, there are higher expectations that they will yield significant benefits. The EHR refers to an individual patient's medical record stored in a digital format. "Information stored in these records pertains patient demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, and radiology reports" (Cherry & Jacob, 2016). Given this, the EHR systems facilitate the safe storage and retrieval of personal records with the help of computers in conjunction with the internet. Data safety is assured for such EHR systems because the data is backed up in cloud-based storage platforms and therefore in case of an accident such as fire there will be no data loss (Snipes, 2016). On the other hand, ePrescribing entails the healthcare provider's ability to electronically send accurate, error-free, and suitable prescription directly to a pharmacy. This has enabled efficient delivery of information, thus eliminating time wastage and errors that arise from hand to hand delivery.

Other than the electronic and personal health record systems which have provided quick retrieval of patient-specific data, there are also decision support systems employed in the healthcare. These systems offer diagnostic as well as treatment advice to the patients from wherever they are located. As such, it has assisted patients in planning themselves adequately, be it financially, before reaching the hospital. These decision support systems have entirely been developed to be user-friendly as they come in the form of mobile apps and also at the official website of the healthcare organization. All these systems have generally facilitated care provision to patients from a distance, and this is commendable. Lastly, the healthcare organization I work at has also adopted the use of telecare applications which monitor the health status of patients who prefer being diagnosed from home. These systems check on the vital signs in patients' homes and send signals to the healthcare provider from the work station. With such a system, there has been less congestion in the hospital wards since the treatment and monitoring is extended to the patient's location and shows the minimal need for a patient to physically avail themselves at the hospital.

It is a hard thing to particularly point out the impacts of the healthcare information technologies on medical outcomes since the effects of technologies are usually challenging to attribute. Even though the benefits associated with these systems outweigh the challenges, as shown above, the problems cannot be neglected. First, the maintenance required for these systems is significantly complicated, costly, and time-consuming. This particularly applies to the in-house systems as they tend to be synchronized with the buildings. Through this, the organization has experienced difficulties in offering reasonable scope for local customization, and as a result, problems associated with software integration have emerged which have disturbed the clinical workflow. However, the management is changing its course towards adopting the purchase of commercial off-the-shelf systems. Second, the technical characteristics associated with the use of the systems has posed a serious challenge to both physicians and the patients. In the case of the EHR systems, there has to be intellectual awareness shared to the patients on how to maneuver the systems because they can sometimes be hard to understand without assistance (Hersh, Totten, Eden, Devine, Gorman, Kassakian, & McDonagh, 2015). So, this means that a new system similar to the EHR and the likes is accompanied by costs for educating the general public. Lastly, social consequences are associated with these systems. The systems are computerized, and therefore, there is less of collaborative working and interaction between the healthcare providers. The lack of face-to-face communication among staff and teams (like in the ePrescribing system) or professionals and patients (Decision support systems) has entirely drifted the focus on work to increased data entry methods. Consequentially, there has been a rise in resistance to the use of these systems and also the development of workarounds where the technology is misused (clinicians diverting attention to social media because of ease of accessibility of computers).

As seen, the healthcare information technology systems are dependent on the sharing of information, and this can be via devices across parties involved. One of the trends that seem promising is the EHR system, which includes the electronic exchange of data regarding health. In this view, the EHR has started being transformed into a state of seamless electronic information exchange, which facilitates the use of data to upgrade the quality, care, and safety (Levine, Lipsitz, & Linder, 2016). This is an attempt to create a fully working electronic health record which can be used to share information among the various healthcare systems, with access allowed for healthcare providers as well as patients. An example includes a case where a patient in the UK, who is initially diagnosed in the home country requires further treatment which can only be acquired in India. It can be hectic to carry all medical records to India as some might get misplaced. Therefore, the use of universal EHR would simplify the access to health records, which could aid in the treatment from a different hospital altogether. With this, then the patients' care outcomes can be significantly improved.

References

Cherry, B., & Jacob, S. R. (2016). Contemporary nursing: Issues, trends, & management. Elsevier Health Sciences. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=vzzdCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=healthcare+information+technology+trends&ots=mNvd4kvrir&sig=SxmmL_zP7GiPl078svYdws7z7tM

Hersh, W. R., Totten, A. M., Eden, K. B., Devine, B., Gorman, P., Kassakian, S. Z., ... & McDonagh, M. S. (2015). Outcomes from health information exchange: systematic review and future research needs. JMIR medical informatics, 3(4), e39. Retrieved from http://medinform.jmir.org/2015/4/e39/?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=JMIR_TrendMD_1

Levine, D. M., Lipsitz, S. R., & Linder, J. A. (2016). Trends in seniors' use of digital health technology in the United States, 2011-2014. Jama, 316(5), 538-540. Retrieved from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2540389?linkid=26992839

Snipes, C. (2016). The Use of the Electronic Health Record in Behavioral Health Quality Improvement Initiatives. In Quality Improvement in Behavioral Health (pp. 193-206). Springer, Cham. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-26209-3_13