A brief overview of What is Health Care Informatics? The definition our text uses for Health care Informatics is from the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and they define informatics as “the discipline concerned with the study of information and manipulation of information via computer-based tools” (2006, pg. 44). Or a general description of health care informatics is the combination of health care science, information science, and computer science. The text gives many definitions but as it states there is a theme, one of combining like the above description details and second of the use of data, information, and knowledge by a nurse. I especially enjoyed reading the goal of NI from our text from the 2001, ANA Scope and Standards of Nursing Informatics Practice..
- The goal of NI is to improve the health of populations, communities, families, and individuals by optimizing information management and communication. This includes the use of technology in the direct provision of care, establishing effective administrative systems, managing and delivering education experiences, supporting life-long learning, and supporting nursing research.
Just as a preface for this next part, this is my opinion with a little research done on other peoples opinions. Who owns the EHR? is a question that has little answer but brings about a lot of good discussion and a need for clarification. Electronic Medical Records are now a thing of common use, no longer are they for the future, but will continue to be a central part in creating the future of health care. Previously, I would have stated without a doubt that medical records belong to the doctors, hospitals, and billing department because they seem to be the only ones with access and who maintained the record for a specific amount of time, depending on the circumstance. Dr. Robert Rowley, MD and Chief Medical Officer of Practice Fusion states that “now with the push toward greater interoperability among EHRs, hospitals, laboratories, public health records, and other sources of patient data, we can now see the emergence of a patient-centered unified health record that is shared by all practitioners involved in a given patient’s care, and used for medical decision-making and advice-giving” (posted April 30, 2009).
So paper health records seems to have a more straightforward owner of insurers and doctors because they own the actual storage system and paper this information is printed on. However, now that the information is digital and it frees it from a particular storage media the confusion still remains. The questions I ask are who has access? It’s not the patient. Due to privacy we still need the safeguards, but have you ever tried to view your records through EHR with any success? Or has your physician tried to explain your records and storage of information and you truly understand it? The ease of use and understanding for the layperson, who is the patient, that we are to be moving toward patient-centered care is still left out of the loop. In my personal and most recent experiences I would have to say the god of the EHR owns the systems because there seems to be no one person who can access everything from every time period in this patient’s chart or care. It is divided through the different interdisciplinaries, yet not one person is looking at the exact same information, just bits and pieces and we are all needed to interpret the details of our patient and his patient-centered care. I feel that the future is bright in regards to EHRs, but that it has yet a long road to go to improve to be a patient-centered entity.
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2009/3/26/article-electronic-health-record-ownership-needs-clarification.aspx
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2009/3/26/article-electronic-health-record-ownership-needs-clarification.aspx
