Healthcare Informatics Essay

1. Fill in the table below with the results from the monosaccharide test experiment, and your conclusions based on those results.

Informatics has many possibilities and benefits. The ever growing technology can improve healthcare to protect patients and the medical staff. At Lakeland they use Epic for electronic computer charting, which decreases time to do and increase availability time. With Epic they have designed safety checks to pop up with wrong medication or even different dosage than ordered to prevent medical errors from happening. Now Guardian is slowly being worked into the system to decrease time it take to input vitals for patients. On some units they have a large screen in the huddle room which allows you to click into a patient's chart and focus in on key things. It even has a list screen that helps you to keep track of daily weights, pain reassessments, and I&Os for all patients on that

Joining the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) benefits individuals and distinguishes them apart from others. AHIMA labels individual’s as competent, knowledgeable and committed to the association through quality healthcare delivery and quality information.

Health informatics is the bridging of computer science, information and the health care field. This interdisciplinary field can be applied to a range of medical fields such as nursing, biomedicine, medicine and subspecialties such as immunology (immunoinformatics). Informatics not only has roles to play in day-to-day areas of immunology such as data storage/retrieval, decision support, standards and electronic health care records but also in research and education such as data mining and simulation systems (Coiera, 2002). Informatics and more specifically, health informatics first started being used in in the late 1950s with the rise of computers (Ho, 2010). Technologies such as computers allowed practitioners and researches

Nursing informatics is a branch of nursing or area of specialty that concentrates on finding ways to improve data management and communication in nursing with the sole objective of improving efficiency, reduction of health costs, and enhancement of the quality of patient care (Murphy, 2010). It is also described as a growing area of nursing specialty that combines computer science, information technology, and nursing science in the management and processing of nursing information, data, and knowledge with the sole objective of supporting nursing practice and research. Various nursing theorists have formulated various theoretical frameworks or models related to nursing informatics (Wager, Lee, & Glaser, 2013), and they are defined as a

Health information technology (HIT) involves trading of health information in an electronic format to advance health care, reduce health expenditures, improve work efficiency, decrease medication errors, and make health care more accessible. Maintaining privacy and security of health information is crucial when technology is involved. Health information exchange plays an important role in improving the quality and delivery of health care and cost-effectiveness. “There is very little electronic information sharing among clinicians, hospitals, and other providers, despite considerable investments in health information technology (IT) over the past five years” (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2014, p. 1).

With the rapid growth in the implementation and use of electronic medical records, there is an increase in how we define the role of nurses and other team member’s (Deese & Stien, 2004). Along with providing optimal care, nurses are also responsible for interpreting and accurately documenting large amounts of information. According to, (Ericksen, 2009) nursing informatics is defined as the integration of nursing, its information, and information management with information processing and communication technology to support the health of people worldwide. In this

This paper will identify the use of Electronic Health Records and how nursing plays an important role. Emerging in the early 2000’s, utilizing Electronic Health Records have quickly become a part of normal practice. An EHR could help prevent dangerous medical mistakes, decrease in medical costs, and an overall improvement in medical care. Patients are often taking multiple medications, forget to mention important procedures/diagnoses to providers, and at times fail to follow up with providers. Maintaining an EHR could help tack data, identify patients who are due for preventative screenings and visits, monitor VS, & improve overall quality of care in a practice. Nurse informaticists play an important role in the

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe two health information and communication technologies (HICTs) and how they aid nurses in supporting safe, quality care, facilitating continuity of care and care coordination, and partnering with patients and families to increase participation in health care. HICT involves electronic creation, storage, exchange, and analysis of health information to advance delivery of health care. Widespread use of HICT within the healthcare industry can achieve the following goals: improve healthcare quality and safety, reduce costs and health disparities, enhance clinical research, and ensure security of patient health information (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). Several examples of HICTs include: electronic medical record systems, electronic prescribing, consumer health applications, and telehealth (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ], 2015). Integration of HICTs in healthcare settings is valuable for all clinicians, but most importantly nurses as they are primary caregivers.

This decreases the chance of medical errors, in that current treatment plans are accessible, and therefore interactions from an additional treatment plan are predictable, enabling the provider to choose the best plan with the least unwanted interaction. As well, the access to diagnostic tests and laboratory tests through HIE, allow all disciplines to previously ordered tests and the results. This decreases the duplication of orders, as well, as limits the patient to the risks associated with the tests. The greatest benefit of HIE is continuity of care. Through HIE, providers can provide continuous care, which is cost effective and delivers a greater quality of care. “Continuity of care improves the uptake of preventive care, enhances adherence to therapy, and increases patient and physician satisfaction; as well, there is increasing evidence that patients' health status and chronic disease outcomes are improved with continuity of care” (Rosser & Schultz, 2007).

A. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of the following categories of healthcare data:

When we talk about healthcare data then it is maintained from long time. One of the reason healthcare providers maintained this data was due to compliance to law. This availability of data, which is seen as major positive for Big Data technology, has a limitation that it is protected by complex web of laws which make it difficult to access. It is like you have to unravel all the riddles posted by law before you can get to that data. For example in United States there is federal law Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect healthcare data. This federal law already brought majority of healthcare data under its umbrella from 1996 onwards. It states that not only clinical information but demographic and financial

My practice is one of three or four primary care practices, including the community health center, that accept patients with Medicaid in Slidell, Louisiana. Medicaid recipients make up approximately 35 to 40 percent of my patient panel. Most patients come to their first appointment with a history of being uninsured for a long period of time prior to receiving recent coverage with Medicaid. As a result, it has been several years since they have been to a primary care provider or had any preventative care. In addition, many have known chronic health problems like hypertension, depression, or diabetes that have been untreated for years due to low income, no health insurance, and lack of accessibility to low-cost or free care and medications. Unfortunately, even with the assistance of Medicaid, a large percentage of this population fails to get the recommended care and testing, consistently do not keep appointments for follow-up or no-show scheduled appointments. Methods of health care informatics will be identified to improve care outcomes among the vulnerable population of those with public health insurance through the state Medicaid system.

When you look at how nursing documentation affects patient outcomes consider all the benefits of informatics. Electronic charting systems allows for automation in patient safety issues. This automation can be prompts that forces a nurse to address things like abuse history, and many other requirements from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and if the nurses document, there is a history of abuse, the system can automatically send a referral to a department to follow up on the nurses charting. The clinical systems store valuable information, and re-populates, this information on later admissions. An example of this valuable information, would be a patient with the diagnosis of methicillin-resistant staph

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).