Health Informatics
Health informatics is a broad word that refers to the act of obtaining, storing, and utilizing various health information in order to create improved collaboration among patients in various health care provider facilities. Various specialties in hospitals are currently attempting to move and organize their data so that they can coexist and work with one another. It is often difficult to confirm the origins of informatics in the field of healthcare (Cleveland & Cleveland, 2009). However, there are actual start dates that are commonly associated with the disciplines of pharmacy, medical and nursing informatics. Use of various software in the healthcare informatics will help in promoting the communication and collaboration across the different departments hence resulting in the improved patient safety and clinical safety.
The Paper Focus
The paper will focus on the ranking of the various healthcare informatics in three selected groups and the different impacts they have on the informatics and also it will give a brief history of the healthcare informatics and the current trends in the healthcare informatics.
Physicians Informatics
These are resources that primarily help in championing the adoption of changes in workflows and EMRs. A person who is responsible for this role should have three essential characteristics that include risk-taking, humility and consensus building. Informatics resource for the physicians must try to understand the existing differences between the various areas of medicine. The doctor's department remains on the top of the rank of informatics. This is because of it the discipline where the use of healthcare informatics has great significance and impacts.
Physical informatics has a lot of effects to the various medical staffs especially doctors and nurses. Use of informatics systems has resulted to the automatic monitoring the patients' blood pressures, oxygen saturation level and heart rhythms and they only alert the physicals when there are some serious concerns about the patients' health status. Hence it has relieved them from making endless rounds of taking the various patients' medical records. The other positive impacts of the physicians' informatics are that it has enabled the doctors to upload the patient health record note into the information system without any fear of risk of misinterpretation by other doctors due to illegible handwriting (Hsu, Chang & Lai, 2016). It has also made the physicians to quickly make the diagnosis of the diseases through assessing the full information of the system from the stored data. Physicians informatics also enable the specialist to telemetrically consult various doctors while sitting on bedsides pharmacist can also deliver full drug prescriptions with fewer risks of making mistakes.
Laboratory Informatics
Laboratory computing has been ranked the second in the health information systems. For the past five decades laboratory informatics has become very crucial for efficient clinical services delivery in various hospitals and management of the laboratory. The ranking category is because the laboratory systems are usually the most sophisticated systems in any healthcare facility across the world. Laboratory informatics continues to go through numerous changes mainly because of the development of development of more advanced electronics system of managing the patient records (Grain & Schaper, 2013).
Laboratory informatics has got a lot of positive impacts on the laboratory users. It has helped in making the various test to be accurate and faster; it also makes the easily access various procedures of doing the different test of diseases in the health system. The use of informatics has also helped in reducing the burden large patients records that are being kept in various laboratories in different hospitals. Use of laboratory informatics also has caused the development of interest to move from the standard internal laboratory issues which include interfacing of the instruments and invention of sophisticated data algorithm, towards other external services issues which usually includes test ordering and the delivery of the test results. Hence, leading to the emergence of new clinical systems. Emerging trends in the laboratory informatics include introducing new approaches in laboratory service delivery such as point-of-care testing and the increasing demand for the direct patient access to lab results mainly for self-management.
Pharmacy Informatics
It is defined as a scientific field that primarily focuses on data that is related to medicine that is being given to the patients and the knowledge that is within the continuum of the healthcare system. The drug knowledge includes how they are being acquired, storage of the medications, various analysis, usage, and the dissemination of the medicine to realize optimal medical related patient care. Pharmacy informatics is mainly concerned with the management of workflow through the use of software tools such as e-prescribing, computer natural order entry, clinical decision support, and the hardware management (Grain & Schaper, 2013). It is ranked the third in the healthcare informatics system mainly because of the bulk of information that needs to be handled in this department.
The information here is usually extensive and should be coordinated so that it should be able to deal with all parts of the doctors' facility operations such as therapeutic, managerial, health-related and other legitimate issues. Use of informatics in pharmacy has a lot of positive impacts which includes, enabling of storage of structured patients' records, facilitating electronic drug prescription. The trends in the pharmacy informatics include online dispensing and administration of medicine, automation of the handling of medication in the supply chain (Erickson, 2014).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the use of informatics in the three core areas of healthcare that is physicians, pharmacy and laboratory are very much crucial in improving the patient safety and enabling the professionals that work in this field to be in a position of providing high-quality care to patients. This also makes patients take their medication at the required time hence improving patient's outcome.
References
Cleveland, A., & Cleveland, D. (2009). Health informatics for medical librarians. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers.
Erickson, A. (2014). Use of technology and pharmacy informatics on the rise. Pharmacy Today, 20(9), 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1042-0991(15)30725-8
Grain, H., & Schaper, L. (2013). Health Informatics. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Hsu, H., Chang, I., & Lai, T. (2016). Physicians’ perspectives of adopting computer-assisted navigation in orthopedic surgery. International Journal Of Medical Informatics, 94, 207-214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2016.07.006
