INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN HEALTHCARE

Information Systems in Healthcare

Information Systems in Healthcare

A few weeks ago, a healthy middle-aged man who was recovering from highly complicated abdominal surgery, was released from South Austin Hospital (SAH) in Austin Texas, a for-profit hospital affiliated with HCA.

As a practicing Registered Nurse, analysis of industry trends, and literature illustrates how until recently, industry behemoths with the market power to dictate change, witnessed a rapid immersion and development of their IT culture. In healthcare, no single organization is so large or influential that it can dictate to the rest of the industry what to do by mere example and expect it to follow; so IT culture has been slower to develop, with advances coming mostly via the trickle down theory. AAs a point of reference, healthcare organizations typically spend between 3 and 4 percent of their budgeted capital on IT. This is low compared to other industries Lang's editor's introduction (as cited in From berg, 2003). Clinical experience and a review of literature has shown there to exist a number of initiatives which have stoked the IT revolution in American healthcare. Here I turn my essay over to Leland Kaiser, PhD, founder and president of Kaiser Consulting, LLC, and Jeff Goldsmith, PhD, owner and operator of Health Futures, Inc., and their poignant thoughts on Computers in Healthcare Delivery: AE-health was strangled in its crib, snaps Goldsmith. It got about two years and it needed ten Goldsmith (as cited in Weber, 2003). Meanwhile, lack of sustained investment means the evolution of health care is going to take a lot longer than pundits anticipated. But eventually, says Kaiser, every bed will be wired to the Internet Kaiser (as cited in Weber, 2003).

An inventory of situational approaches, passive inquiry of physicians, collateral health-care providers, and review of literature, identified the following opportunities recognized secondary to the effective use of IT.

The central role of the physician is the provision of care to individual patients. This process centres on the consultation between the physician and the patient. This process requires and generates information, historically recorded on a paper based medium. The limitations of paper records as a standard repository of information, is universally recognized as lacking the dynamic which electronic data medium promise: in effect, paper strangles the process of delivering timely high quality health-care delivery.

Entities which are converting to electronic patient records, report greater flexibility in their ability to deliver timely, high-quality patient care. Factors enabling such flexibility are;

A means of transfer of computerized records when patients move between practices.

Continuing efforts to improve ease of use in the consulting room: This is essential to enable consistent data uptake and capture without disruption of the doctor-patient relationship.

Ability to incorporate patient-related information received from outside the practice into the patient record held by the practice.

Many practices surveyed were considering the use of scanners to append information in paper documents to patient records.

Availability of access at all the places where the health-care provider is likely to be consulted by the patient: Workstations/terminals in every consulting ...