Bioinformatics is a multi-disciplinary field which involves health information technology to improve the efficacy of health care by incorporating better quality, efficient and new technologies. Health informatics is an amalgamation of various disciplines like information science, computer science, social science, management science, behavioral science and others. There are various sub categories in health informatics like the “clinical informatics, pathological informatics, pharmacy informatics, public health informatics, community health informatics, home health informatics, nursing informatics, medical informatics, consumer health informatics, and clinical bio informatics” [1]. In the last 40 years, bioinformatics field has grown beyond …show more content…
These paper based system were inefficient for managing large databases thereby affecting the health care of the patients. These conventional methods were not only unorganized but also sometimes illegible [4, 13], making it harder for the physicians to locate the information of the patients [5, 13]. Most of the time, patients had to retake the tests causing delay in medical examination and increase in cost. In the recent past, with the advent of bioinformatics, storage of medical records is becoming computerized and thereby improving healthcare.
The bioinformatics has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for physicians in the field of decision making. It has been observed, majority of the delay in medical decision is due to lack of information. Every year thousands of researches are conducted all around the world and it is impossible for physicians to keep a track about the information obtained from the results of clinical trials and other studies. The information obtained from these clinical results can be used as reference by the physicians in their medical decisions. The lack of information causes delay and thereby affecting patient healthcare. Bioinformatics help in keeping updated records of the results obtained from the researches. For example, MEDLINE is a database which contains 460,000 references of the information obtained from the conducted clinical trials and other studies. It is updated every year [6, 13].
Health information technology (HIT) is revolutionizing the way we interact with health-related data. One example of this is the obvious rise in
In fact, in some instances, doctors find it more difficult to complete with their already hectic and demanding schedule. The article describes the medical records used in the UK which is an envelope of information that follows a patient their entire life. The providers know what to expect when viewing these records and are able to efficiently and effectively use them as a resource when seeing patients. A main takeaway from this article regarding medical records from the UK is that they must be well kept and organized and also keep the same geographical layout and consistency to be effective. By gathering and reporting information in this way, it allows the provider to be concise. The short notes are almost like clues for a future provider about what the previous encounter entailed and how the issue has progressed or regressed. The article discusses VAMP, the “Value Added Medical Products” computer system which is how the United Kingdom does electronic medical records. Their goal was to replace paper records with this type of system, however it did not work out that way. In this type of reporting, there is both a medical file and a therapeutic file which allow the doctors to separate what they are recording. There are many negatives and positives of a computer system such as this one such as it may remind a physician of a treatment or prescription that was given
“a paperless, digital and computerized system of maintaining patient data, designed to increase the efficiency and reduce documentation errors by streamlining the process.”(Santiago, n.d., para. 1)
However, health informatics is the kind of application system normally used by most hospitals and clinics to deliver high quality and cost efficient healthcare service to the community. According to Bacon County Hospital press release (2002), the informatics system was implemented to make the delivery of medical services such as surgical treatment and other general treatment faster. In this paper, therefore we look into how the informatics systems/applications has evolved since it was implemented by the Bacon County Hospital; discuss the future trends for healthcare informatics and how these trends impact the healthcare delivery system.
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).
Worldwide use of computer technology in medicine began in the early 1950s with the rise of the computers. In 1949, Gustav Wagner established the first professional organization for informatics in Germany. Medical informatics research units began to appear during the 1970s in Poland and in the U.S. Since then the development of high-quality health informatics research, education and infrastructure has been a goal of the U.S. and the European Union. (NYU graduate training program, 2010) Changes in the healthcare environment produced fundamental shifts in the delivery of healthcare. The altering landscape of healthcare is creating a huge demand for health data analytics. The growth and maturity of healthcare informatics over the past decade has been a prime catalyst in positioning the healthcare industry for the changes posed by reform measures. By understanding the process of analytics, clinical informatics specialists say healthcare providers have the insight necessary to make the process adjustments in the future.(Riskin, 2013)
The Intro to Health Informatics course has provided a broad range of health information that introduces the core concepts in the biomedical community. Throughout this course, my learning experience in health informatics has advance, for I was able to learn a list of materials including: the relationship of biomedical informatics and its related field; the roles of informatics in decision support systems and related health IT applications; and the importance of biomedicine and the use of biomedical information. In the Biomedical Informatics (4th edition) text book, it reflects the outstanding changes in both computing and health care that continues to occur. These changes have set a high rate of interest in the roles that health IT must play in the health care.
Decision support systems are ideally interactive systems that allow the decision making physician to come to the conclusion based on a host of information pulled from data bases, personal knowledge, predesigned modals etc. Decision support systems have many benefits such as; patient-time efficiency, speed up process of decision making, promotes learning and training, reveals new approaches in thought process, generates new evidence in support of a decision and encourages exploration and discovery of the decision maker (Bosworth, York, Kotansky, & Berman, 2011). Although these systems require end user expertise, correct inputs and appropriate modals, they also require vast and exstenive information. Immunoinformatics are used to compile vast amounts of data for the immunology field (De Groot A. , Immunomics: discovering new targets for vaccines and therapeutics , 2006). This data includes genetic mapping, protein structures, cytometry data and many other data pools needed by immunologists to make correct decisions. Immunoinformatics face to challenge of compiling this enormous amounts of data in an organised and correct way. This data needs to be mapped into correct diagnostic modals for the physician to use in their decision support system (Barh, Misra, & Kumar, 2010). This data leads to new ways of hypothesis testing for immune responses
This keen interest in pursuing a master degree in biomedical informatics is borne out of a desire to acquire knowledge and from a number of experiences and encounters I had during the course of my upbringing, my medical training and practice as a doctor. They served as my earliest contact with health information issues as well as the major drive behind my interest in pursuing a master degree in biomedical informatics.
When I first enrolled in BMI 5300: Introduction to Biomedical Informatics class, I was very eager and excited to learn the role of biomedical informatics in healthcare organizations and the importance of data capture and analysis in improving public health. One of the major misconceptions I had was that this course would not cover wide range of factors influencing the biomedical informatics field. Much to my surprise, the course provided a comprehensive analysis of factors related to biomedical informatics, including but not limited to EHR systems, interfaces, Health Information Exchanges, Meaningful Use (MU) requirements, and controlled medical vocabularies such as Logical Observation Identifiers Names and
The advent of improved technologies has transformed every aspect of human life including the nursing practice. Improved computer systems have transformed nursing practice as well as healthcare, with the arrival of nursing informatics (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2014). The Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) defines nursing informatics as the field involved in the study and manipulation of information using various computer-based tools. The use of computers in the healthcare sector started to gain ground in the 1950s and has experienced tremendous growth until now. The main objective of nursing informatics is to advance the health of individuals and communities through optimizing information management as well as communication.
Electronic Medical Records or Computerized Medical Record System what is it and what are the advantages along with the disadvantages of using this system? That is what we will discuss in this paper.
The profession of health informatics is a relatively new one, blending the use of technologies with collecting, organizing, storing, using, and evaluating health information.
Databases are usually designed in a way it can offer organized a good mechanism for storage, and for retrieving information. Consequently, this paper analyzes the fundamentals of the database characteristics and structures, types of medical data records that are relevant to the project being implemented and the importance of uniform terminology, coding and standardization of the data. The paper also analyzes various information standards that are applicable for the project.
Bioinformatics is the applications of computers, software, and mathematical models to the management of biological information from large data sets. It is the storage and analysis of biological information by the use of computers. Computers are used to gather, store, analyze, and integrate information that can then be applied to gene-bases drug discovery and development. This has become an essential part of biological research activity, and is rapidly becoming as ordinary in biosciences as molecular biology has been since the 1980s. The science of Bioinformatics, which is the melding of molecular biology with computer science, is essential to the use of genomic information in understanding human diseases and in the identification of new molecular targets for drug discovery (What is bioinformatics). The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes. It is the "determination of the sequence of the entire human genome (approximately three billion base pairs)” (What is bioinformatics). This is done so differently from other approaches, however, due to its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques to achieve this goal. "With bioinformatics, scientists can compare data from genetic material of a variety of living things, from tiny bacteria to large organisms, such as humans (Bioinformatics, 2012).