Health care informatics

Health care informatics

Introduction

Healthcare informatics, also regarded as medical informatics, biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, nursing informatics, and biomedical informatics typically refers to intersection of information technology, computer science in health care systems. This discipline deals with devices, methods and the necessary resources in optimizing the storage, acquisition, retrieval and utilization of health and medical information. In recent times, this has been applied in health care areas such as public health, clinical practice, occupational therapy, dentist, medical and biomedical research, pharmacy, and other health groups such as admissions, finance, and admissions. This paper evaluates the three informative groups that have been seen to have the greatest impact on informatics i.e. clinical informatics, administrators, and nursing informatics.

Clinical Informatics

Clinical informatics refers to the application of information technology by practitioners in offering of healthcare services. It is also referred as operational informatics and applied clinical informatics. In essence, it is concerned with the use f of information within the healthcare settings by the clinical staff. It involves a wide range of topics such as pathology, radiology, dermatology, ophthalmology and so on. Moreover, it also deals with such issues as provision of entry systems for orders, system designing, system implementation and adoption issues (American Medical Informatics Association 2013).

In essence, clinical informatics assist clinical staff in such health matters as testing, configuration, analyzing, testing, training or troubleshooting a particular operation within the healthcare setting. For instance, clinical analyst may be very significant and helpful in configuring the application of radiology within the health care setting, or those applications used in the administrator’s offices. They could also assist in training the clinicians on the application in the health care settings.

Nursing Informatics

The university of Maryland states that people opting to learn nursing informatics are given responsibilities and roles of combining information technology, computer science and the nursing science. These individuals are further mandated to incorporate system information, their nursing knowledge, information and data into the nursing field. A practitioner in nursing informatics has a role in translating his or her patient’s needs and those of other staff into IT programs in the sense that the technical support fully understands and improves the performance in health care.

Practitioners in nursing informatics are not only responsible for entering information and data into computers but they are also mandated to implementing the ever , policies, procedures, programs and testing situations. Nurse informatics are also mandated with the task of teaching trainees and other nurses on novel applications as well as processing new changes. In addition, they make sure that findings from studies and reports are understandable to both clients and other staff. They also offer technical writing support to other health staff besides documenting technical solutions and specifications that satisfies public needs.

Administrative Informatics

The field of administrative informatics in healthcare is concerned with the acquisition, evaluation, implementation as well as the daily activities of the Information systems in the healthcare settings. These operations offer support to clinical and administrative roles within the health care settings. This filed is closely related to its biomedical informatics counterparts.

Administrative informatics have become arguably very essential in the management of clinical data and information essentially in this time when health records is becoming more complicated and paramount to health provision. The standards, policies and regulations are consistenly growing in scope and continue to remain crucial to health delivery. Administrative informatics in healthcare is very essential with regard to service operations, cost reductions, resource maintenance and upgrade, and enhancement of patient care through use of the standard systems in electronic health records. Moreover, it is also crucial in upgrading the information systems for in other areas such as health research, billing, medical information exchange and patient scheduling. Practitioners in health informatics in most cases provide leadership functions in many departments in the healthcare settings.

Informatics Ranking

As defined by Pottel (1999), ranking is the connection between sets of items such that for any two objects, one of them supersedes the other which is lower or equal to the other. The ranking procedure ought to be in orderly manner. In this perspective, clinical informatics is ranked as the first in significance, followed by nursing informatics and finally administrative informatics.

Practitioners in clinical informatics health care services that is utterly invaluable in the healthcare industry in general. These figures are also very important to clients who regularly seek care and treatment from healthcare facilities and health practitioners. In essence, clinical informatics offer an efficient means of storing, recording and the retrieving an all important information that facilitates the smooth operations in the healthcare settings and to the efficient provision of health care services. In employing clinical informatics, the all important and crucial information from the patient’s charts including the heart rate, and blood pressure could be automatically encoded into information systems such as electronic databases which could consequently facilitate easy retrieval and analysis. The information tools which clinical informatics relies on could assist a lot in preventing the administration of contraindicated or conflicting drugs provide crucial information with regard to the patient’s problems and other health issues, medical history of the patient and so on. The so crucial information that is stored in such technological systems could be efficiently and quickly distributed to various health practitioners in the various health departments or medical/health facilities that are located in some distances from each other. This kind of information sharing in health care is regarded as “telemedicine” and has been very effective in assisting health care practitioners in treating or diagnosing not only effectively, but also faster.

Although nursing informatics is also an important element in health care, it cannot be rated the same as clinical informatics. This is because the former deals directly with the patients while the latter is majorly focused on finding means of improvement the management of information, healthcare communications, costs reductions and improvement of health service delivery. Also unlike clinical informatics, few nurse informaticists undertake duties related to patient care. Duties of clinical informatics professionals on the contrary are focused on the care of their clients.

The administrative informatics in healthcare is on the other hand an emerging field which has not extensively explored by health practitioners. The reason as to why these field has come into focus is probably due to the consistent mistakes that are also costly made by some health practitioners and health organizations in their course of implanting their health data and information. This field also focuses on health administrators some of which are not effective in handling IT related components. While others require full preparation and training in information systems to be able to execute their mandate, there are those who are just reluctant to learn the new systems and therefore, making this field less significant in health settings when compares with clinical and nurse informatics.

Reference

AMIA (2013). “Health Informatics” Available on

http://www.amia.org/applications-informatics/clinical-informatics

Pottel, H (1999). “Statistical flaws in excel” Available from

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/life-on campus/faculties-and-schools/faculty-of-engineering

and-computing/