Health Issues Of Health Informatics

Informatics is the science of the management of information. It includes different techniques on how the information is collected, stored, utilized and sent to other locations or transmitted. Informatics utilizes computers to process this information. Clinical informatics is also known as health informatics. Clinical informatics is the application and integration part of informatics. It takes the information that has been studied and learned and puts it into practice. (Coiera, 2015). Thus supporting best practices amongst organizations and improving the quality of care given. Informatics takes information studied and uses it to improve efficiency of care givers, eases quality improvement measures, and aids in decreasing liability risks (Aston, 2014).

Health information is a fundamental piece of data which represents a person, business, organization, or a community. This data is vital in monitoring and coordination of care for individuals and communities. It not only monitors and coordinates patient care, but reduces costly mistakes and prevent duplication of treatments as well as taking a pivotal role in preserving, securing, and protecting personal health information. Since, this information is extremely essential and sensitive, it must remain secure and safe to prevent frauds and cyber-attacks. First of all, this paper discusses vitality of the health information in regards to individuals, professionals, and organizations along with its benefits to improve overall quality of life. Secondly, it discusses the role of information technology in various aspects of the industry and the what the future holds within IT.

There is no doubt in that technology has multifaceted benefits but, at the same time, it has forced mankind to feel insecure. Every industry depends upon the data of the customers and the health industry is no more an exception here. The data of each patient is shared to facilitate health itself and for more rigorous and authentic research. Hence, protecting patient data is very important. It is so important that in 1996, the federal government introduced the Health Insurance

With the enthusiasm for health information technology, potential risks and problems associated with electronic health records have received far less attention. Three fundamental security goals are essential to EHR systems: confidentiality, integrity and availability (Haas e26). Patients lose the protection of implied trust domain of medical institutions due to their medical record maintenance performed by non-medical enterprises (e27). Depending on the paradigm, enabling access to an increased number of users poses threats to security and privacy.

Hospitals have put in place widespread security and privacy measures to protect patient health information. However, there are still errors being made in data security through the IT standpoint. Some of these errors or issues include:

Data security is used to prevent anything that is unauthorized, and it helps to protect all of the data from any corruption. Almost daily, media reports highlight the failure of health care organizations to safeguard the privacy and security of patient data, whether electronic or paper. Preventing data breaches has become more complex, and at the same time, the fines being levied against health care organizations for violating the Health Insurance, (Zamosky, 2014).# In this paper, I will discuss the security measures, how the security measures used and how well did the security measure work.

Data privacy is vital to healthcare organizations and the health information they store. Johns (YEAR) defines data security as “a collection of protection measures and practices that safeguard data, computers, and associated resources from undesired occurrences and exposures” (p. 207). To protect their information, organizations must develop a data security program to meet the needs of Health Information Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA), stakeholders, and the business’s needs. Additionally following the guidelines set by HIPAA is key to being in compliance with the law. These programs differ depending on the organizations that are required to establish them, however, they all follow the same steps in creating and implementing this program

1. a) Nursing informatics is used to inform about what nurses do and how nurses use information to make decisions for patients. Nurses use EHRs to manage patient information (Pritchard, 2015). Nursing informatics allows nurses to remain interconnected with other health care professionals from other disciplines, so that information is seamlessly exchanged between nurses and the rest of the health care team (Pritchard, 2015). Nursing informatics is also used to personalize patient care and to inform patients about their care as consumers and keep them involved. Nursing informatics I also used to improve public health by using better data collection, bio-surveillance, and quality measurement in research to influence patient outcomes (Pritchard, 2015).

According to AMIA and American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), “Biomedical informatics is the interdisciplinary, scientific field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health” (as cited in Hoyt et al., 2014, p. 4). Biomedical informatics focus not only on clinical, medical and public health fields, but also focuses on dental, nursing, pharmacy, medical imaging and veterinary fields (Hoyt et al., 2014, p. 4).

Privacy of health information has become an area of emphasis across the healthcare industry. It is important to understand what data is protected under federal regulations, how it can be shared, and how to prevent any accidental exposure of protected data. It is possible that data that should be protected can be exposed without anyone even realizing a violation has occurred. Exposure of protected healthcare data can result in medical identity theft and is therefore a very important and hot topic. The security and privacy of healthcare data is necessary to ensure consumer confidence in the healthcare industry and to prevent medical identity theft.

In today’s society, medical records becomes a huge issue. In many organizations such as healthcare, patient confidentiality becomes a high concern. Having internet health services, creates a challenge for compliance in healthcare. Providers have treated application security and infrastructure security independently until now. Access must be secured for clinical applications to alleviate the concern from providers in healthcare. Therefore, IT infrastructure must be protected from hackers, misusing information as well as thieves. (FairWarning, n.d.)

Demographic shifts in the global population, greater levels of technological disruption due to the Internet, social media and the en masse adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs are together re-defining the healthcare informatics market. System and informatics theories have emerged as the foundational elements of healthcare informatics supported by the Data, Information. Knowledge (DIK) Model which acts as a taxonomy for these developments (Haugh, 2005). Systems and informatics theories along with the DIK Model form the ontological foundations of healthcare informatics field of research occurring today and will continue to provide a basis for further research (Braganza, 2004). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the contributions of systems and informatics, the role of the DIK Model, expert systems in nurse care and medicine, and the use of decision aids and decision support systems. All of these elements are critically important to strategic information systems plans healthcare providers put into place to serve patients while giving healthcare professionals the applications, systems and software they need to excel in their roles (Djellal, Gallouj, 2007).

In light of available security measures and their widespread acceptance within the information security community, there is no excuse for healthcare organizations to fail in fulfilling their duty to protect personal patient information. Guaranteeing the confidentiality and privacy of data in healthcare information is crucial in safeguarding the data of patients as there should be a legal responsibility to protect medical records from unauthorized access.

In the relationship of biomedical informatics and its related field, I was able to learn the diverse fields of health informatics, such as medical informatics, bioinformatics, and clinical informatics. I’ve learned that these fields are involved with technology communication system, and they have different types of functions in the health care industries. According to Shortliffe, medical informatics is the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research. As for bioinformatics, the scientific field that study how information is represented and analyzed in the biological system, such as information resulting at

Information security and privacy is occupying a most important role in the healthcare territory in order to deliver protected information process to their patients (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). As healthcare department is the organization with vast data and essential information the hospitals has to keep a useful information security technique in their enterprise process (Mishra et al., 2011). Information security is one such phase in the healthcare sphere which is extremely problematic to describe and evaluate even to the individuals who are working on the process. In the healthcare organization, information is of many types which required for the work and even the security is a main control for almost all the practices which are transmitted out in the healthcare field (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). Hospitals, in specific, have been instructed to create a new set of security specialists to protect healthcare data tools techniques upon which exists may rely. Healthcare data is very critical for patients because it is very confidential records. If a medical apparatus is filled with a computer virus it can even exemplify a possibility to patients ' lives. Hence, hospitals should design alertness of the risk, to defend against concerns to healthcare databanks and be concerned about the high risk of infected computers or medical tools being connected to their networks (Mishra et al., 2011).