Is the development of Healthcare Informatics driving healthcare?

            Has the development of Healthcare Informatics started to shape the way our healthcare system manages chronic illness in patients?

With the development of electronic medical records and patient portals patients have become more engaged in their own healthcare needs. It has allowed physicians the ability to manage needs based of patient provided information. “The medical profession continues to advance the implementation of electronic personal health records (PHRs). It has been 13 years since the Journal of the American Medical Association and the US Department of Health and Human Services declared this trend inevitable and an important strategy to improve the quality of health care” (Byczkowski et al., 2013).

Along with patient portals physicians have tool such as “Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) have been proved as an efficient way to improve health care quality” (Shang et al., 2017). With the ongoing development of healthcare informatics, physicians can use a vast amount of data to determine the best plan of action for a patient’s long term care goals. “Clinical decision support (CDS) systems link patient data with an electronic knowledge base in order to improve decision-making and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is a requirement to setup electronic CDS” (Beeler et al., 2014).

Benefits of Healthcare Informatics tools within healthcare?

In the world of healthcare informatics there are new things evolving every day. With the development of electronic health records tools are vast and widely used by physicians, caregivers, and patients daily. There has been some struggle in implementing tools such as patient portals and clinical decision-making software into the traditional practice of medicine. It has been noted in several articles that this is an ongoing struggle that we continue to try and resolve to advance practice. “The discipline of Clinical Informatics is still evolving and its

overall track record of delivering high quality computer systems into routine clinical practice is poor. Therefore, the role of evaluation is crucial in supplying the Clinical Informatics community with good quality knowledge for future efforts in applying IT to healthcare” (Heathfield & Pitty, 1998). We as a medical informatics society need to continue to stay current on the changes within of EHR to encourage and teach others within healthcare to use all available resources to promote better quality patient care.

Methodology

I feel strongly about patient surveys being delivered to patients following any interaction within healthcare. We can use this qualitative data to formulate a plan to help develop the use of health informatics within healthcare. This data can be collected in many forms through electronic surveys, email, phone, and letters sent to patients. This would allow us to reach our diverse population of patients. With the ability to send out surveys and cater them to the current issues that need to be addressed. Also allows for continued research that will change and develop over time.

Discussion

The purpose of this research proposal is to grow and develop a better healthcare system geared toward managing patients’ healthcare needs with increased patient engagement. I feel very strongly about encouraging patients to take part in their own care and strongly about the use of tools surrounding healthcare informatics. I have been in healthcare now for thirteen years and have seen the evolution of paper charts to electronic health records. I know first-hand some of the limitations when it comes to developing the use of these tools.  The information surrounding this topic is in abundance and can be looked at very various angles. I think the focus should be on increasing patients use of patient portals and increasing physician use of clinical decision software. Both tools provide to us could change healthcare today if we would encourage greater use of them.