Information Technology : An Effective Health Organization Essay

Latour, Kathleen and Eichenwald-Maki, eds. (2009). HI300: Information Technology & Systems for Healthcare. Chicago: American Health Information Management Association

Health information technology (HIT) applies to health care and is used to securely exchange health information between providers, consumers, and payers. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is used for improving the quality, safety and efficiency of the health system. The use of EHR provides better care and decreases healthcare cost. A poorly designed and improper use EHR system can lead to errors affecting the integrity of information leading to lower quality of attention. HIT, including EHRs, is critical in the transformation of the healthcare system into an efficient, safer, cost effective and consistently delivers high-quality care. HIT and EHR include electronic prescribing and clinical decision support. EHR systems transform the delivery of healthcare. (Chaudhry, B. Wang, J., & Wu, S. et al., 2006).

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:

Implementation of Healthcare Information Technology potentially reduces cost yet, remains a continuous challenge. The adoption of improved healthcare infrastructure is compelling and significant barriers remain such as technical issues, cost, concerns about privacy and confidentiality, system interoperability and lack of well trained staff to lead the process (Palvia, Love, Nemati, & Jacks, 2012).

The health IT system is essential to transform the delivery of health care. Innovation within the IT system includes efficient data use through warehouses as they expand health information, which allows for big improvements in the technological use. These improvements would ensure that data user safety will allow the smooth exchange of information transfer electronically between different health care providers. In this case, most hospital employees and health care organizations understand how the health information technology (IT) is important for the HCO’s functions. The passing of “the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) legislation in 2009, with its specific attention to advancing EHRs, federal dollars are dedicated to expanding EHR use in physician offices and more” (Abdelhak pg. 180). This shows that a federal government has an ability to change in the healthcare industry, so the government should incorporate science and technology development. The private sector and government funding resources will also have a significant impact to play a great role in the exploration of new software operations in terms of advancing the technological environment. Advancing this area of the organization encourages health Information

Health Information Exchange is a fairly new concept in the healthcare field. There were several precursors to HIE that were in use throughout the United States, these include Community Health Management Information Systems, Community Health Information Networks, and Regional Health Information Organizations. There are several data factors that make up a Health Information Exchange, the Electronic Health Record and the Personal Health Record. One of the biggest concerns about medical information is keeping it safeguarded, and there are three ways to accomplish this, with administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. Finally, there are a number of benefits to having a secure Health Information Exchange. The benefits include; accessibility, wherein multiple users can access the data at the same time, communication, wherein providers can share information quickly with no corruption of critical data, and better healthcare management. By building disease and chronic care registries, symptoms, treatment, and outcomes are tracked. The Health Information Exchange also enables contagious disease and bioterrorism tracking, but reporting symptoms to the CDC daily.

When the physicians tries to buy the same EHR product as their hospital it’s trying to accomplish how to make process writing order from their practices to the hospital. The physicians would have better access to the information that is needed to monitor the patients. The provider would be able to tap into the other providers’ through EHR systems when they are covering the emergency room.

Currently, the healthcare industry only spends 2% of gross revenues on health information technology, while the banking industry spends upwards of 10%. However, the Veterans Healthcare System is one of the largest integrated systems in the world. One hundred fifty-five hospitals and eight hundred clinics rely on one electronic health system (Gupta & Murtaza, 2009). Implementing information systems in hospitals is more challenging than elsewhere because of the complexity of medical data, data entry problems, security and confidentiality concerns and a general lack of awareness of the benefits of Information Technology (Boonstra et al., 2014). The newly implemented system must be reliable from the onset as patient care does not cease in the meantime. Technology has the potential to streamline current practices and reduce costs, however, hospitals must consider the potential risks and consequences of a poorly implemented project and agree that failure is not an option. Good project planning and management can assure success of Electronic Health Record

Information security so important in healthcare because being able to share data digitally holds a lot of potential for doctors, nurses and clinicians to send and receive content fast and effectively. Although this is a great thing, on one hand, it is also dangerous because patient data and other sensitive information are even more at risk of being stolen, exposed or accessed by unauthorized parties. Because of this, security must be a top priority for any medical organization today and for the future. In order to ensure patient data will be secure, healthcare facilities should implement safeguards on data information.

Information technology(IT) in the 21st century has brought in several innovative changes in the physician practice and hospital system.There are several new possibilities and opportunities for information use and communication, at the same time there are new ethical, clinical, and legal concerns that have arisen with the use of information technology.As healthcare is growing complex, the majority of the studies focuses on new modalities of diagnosis and treatment.Conversely, no effort is targeted on improving operational systems.Although IT has brought in a mass customization, it poses threat to the medical safety ( Jorgenson, Notman, Benedek, & Malmquist, 2011). Recently, privacy and security concerns

As technology becomes increasingly infused with our daily lives, information security has become a universal concern. An examination of the healthcare system reveals that it is not exempt from the same information security challenges that other organizations face. The use of information technology in healthcare offers significant benefits, such as improved safety and healthcare quality, reduced cost of healthcare, greatly increased efficiency within healthcare operations, and better collaboration among healthcare professionals. However, as provider and patient data are converted into digital form, ensuring information security can become a daunting task. While there has been significant progress, healthcare IT is still in its infancy, and

Healthcare providers need to have quick access to all of a patient's medical information whenever and wherever the patient goes for care. There are systems to help standardize electronic medical records, such as the National Health Information Infrastructure, which would help provide qucik and easy access to the patient's information. The department of Health and Human Services has made an effort to proctect the privacy of all medical records by enacting a Privacy Rule under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. These regulations were designed to help protect a patients' identifiable health information that is provided to health plans, hospitalts, doctors, and any other healthcare providers. The personal information that

The American Health Information Management Association defines Health Information Management as “the practice of acquiring, analyzing, and protecting digital and traditional medical information vital to providing quality patient care” (ahima.org, What is Health Information?). This field is directly involved with information governance and managing the life cycle of all information. HIM is concerned with information governance because of the importance of balancing the availability of information with the security of that information. This delicate balance is paramount to the protection of everyone from the patient to the facility that is managing the information. The need to worry about information governance has recently become even more important with the transition to the Electronic Health Record.

Health information management involves the practice of maintaining and taking care of health records in hospitals, health insurance companies and other health institutions, by the use of electronic means (McWay 176). Storage of medical information is carried out by health information management and HIT professionals using information systems that suit the needs of these institutions. This paper answers four major questions concerning health information systems.

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).