Health Care Management

Health Care Management

Abstract

Healthcare informatics is area under healthcare which specifically focuses on using information generated in form of big data in healthcare systems and using these data systematically and efficiently using computer aided systems. The present paper discusses the healthcare informatics area in details, the key challenges encountered by organizations while implementing healthcare informatics in their system, the research methodology used for the present research is secondary research where data from articles and journals have been collected and later on analyzed in order to come out with better outcomes in relation to an interesting area of healthcare informatics. The paper then concludes with recommendations and suggestions for future study and possibilities in this interesting space.

Introduction

Healthcare informatics is a new field in healthcare systems. With increasing use of technologies while diagnosing, detecting and treatment of patients, lot of data gets generated while using wide variety of technologies and computer aided systems. This data which is big data in other form can be utilized efficiently when a proper computerized system is in place. The use of data can be beneficial for both the organization and the patient who is getting treated in the vicinity of the hospital or organization. Use of data for proper management of healthcare services has become new face of how healthcare organizations carry out management of services rendered by them to the needy patients. Healthcare informatics broadly deals with four areas. These areas are bioinformatics, medical informatics, public health informatics, and consumer health informatics. Healthcare informatics together helps in improving the quality of services rendered by hospitals or institutes, improves the patient care standards, increases the productivity, and helps in transferring the confidential information within the organizations or healthcare specialists. Healthcare informatics considers holistic improvement of healthcare standards, not only in the organization but also in specific community or city or the whole country. Huge amount of data generated with regular inpatient and outpatient services helps in making intelligent decisions during healthcare services improving the overall deliverables of services by the hospitals and institutes in order to raise the standards of end user care in other words patient care.

Healthcare informatics also considers nursing informatics as one of its key areas. Nursing informatics is broad area where information generated can be used by the nurses in order to improve their service standards. Nursing informatics brings automation in the system and helps in achieving the real time patient care and support by the nurses involved in their patient care services.

Healthcare informatics is data driven and patient centered system which brings automation in the complete system and helps in achieving real time treatment goals, which helps in saving quality time of the patients as well as the healthcare specialists. On time and timely delivery of treatments also helps in reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with the wide variety of diseases and disease outcomes.

Healthcare informatics brings patient centered approach in the system automatically and helps in serving the patient in an effective and efficient manner. Healthcare informatics helps in synchronizing data at one point and helps in distributing the quality and important data maintaining the confidentiality across the inter connected systems.

Healthcare informatics brings computer aided systems into real time usefulness and helps in raising the standards of overall quality services in order to boost the healthcare system in particular location or city or country.

With the help of healthcare informatics community services are improved and has proven advantages for the governments in managing the data of patients in their country or state or city.

Recently UKchip, United Kingdom council for healthcare informatics professionals are working on system to be updated in order to bring together all the expert organization under one umbrella and systematically improve the quality standard of services rendered by the healthcare service providers all across the country located at wide locations.

Healthcare informatics would bring together collaboration not only between the national health organizations but also help them align and collaborate together with other globally located and global operating healthcare service providers.

There is increasing burden of lifestyle diseases and untreatable diseases over the countries. With the help of healthcare informatics these increasing burden of diseases could be dealt with efficient strategies in order to minimize their effect over the overall global population.

Healthcare informatics also brings the research organizations in close alignment with healthcare service providers and helps in bridging the gap between the research organizations and healthcare service organizations under the control of national organization.

Each and every system gets interconnected with each other and brings the different organization within the healthcare industry closer and at one interface. This helps in bringing down the confusion and wastage of energy and resources in order to provide care to the patients.

Healthcare informatics deals with two broad issues that is public health and community health. With informatics in place, the national organizations and global organizations can work together along with other healthcare organizations spread across the nation and globally and delivers information’s which helps in optimizing the patient care services with the end goal or reducing the disease burden over the nation or over the whole globe.

Healthcare informatics helps in bringing together all the players in healthcare systems under one umbrella. Be it the community service providers, local general practitioners, General surgeons, physicians, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, nurses, voluntary service providers, national health programs, community health programs, ambulance services, critical care service providers, emergency service providers, research organizations, pharmacies, pharmacists, scientists. All of them are interconnected with the help of healthcare informatics and share information with each other generated during providing their individualistic care to the end user.

With the help of healthcare informatics it’s very much interesting that quality systematics national programs conducted by governments on time to time basis gets executed with the help of healthcare informatics at each touch points where a particular patient interacts with the service providers. The data generated during such services gets fed into the system and a person located centrally in the country could access this quality information. Based on which governments are in access to the quality data and which they can use to develop healthcare policies and programs in order to improve the present conditions of disease burdens at wide variety of locations. Managing and controlling the services and professionals becomes a centralized task and helps in bringing optimization in the complete healthcare system.

Health informatics helps in dealing with challenges such as increasing cost of healthcare services and increasing expectations of the patients from the service providers. Across the world there is increasing burden of elderly population and other lifestyle diseases which hampers the whole system in dealing with this increasing burden. Also the advancements in technologies make the complete healthcare system highly costly and out of the reach of general population. In order to deal with these key challenges a healthcare informatics tools helps bringing the cost down and improving the patient satisfaction through quality services provided in accordance to the global standards and reaching the local population.

Population across the globe is increasing day by day and also the population of the patients is increasing day by day. Managing this burden is not possible without a system in place which could help in managing services to be given to such increasing burden of population. Healthcare informatics can deal with such situation effectively as the qualities described earlier which are bringing all the service providers under one umbrella. Data management and knowledge management becomes better with the help of healthcare informatics into the system.

Healthcare informatics according to earlier understanding was just about using computer aided systems in order to record the data generated through patient services. After the detailed study regarding this ever increasing topic it could be understood that it’s not just recording the data in computer aided systems. Its way of bringing revolution in healthcare services through use of quality data and much more about bringing all the players in healthcare systems under one umbrella thus helping in managing the ever increasing disease burden and improving the quality standards in order to match the patients expectations.

Methods selection

For the purpose of this study, a secondary research has been selected. The secondary research was conducted through wide variety of research journals and articles available through, science direct, pub med, Google scholar. Secondary research was carried out using following keywords,

1. Healthcare informatics
2. Healthcare informatics in UK
3. Healthcare informatics in London
4. Key challenges faced by healthcare informatics in UK
5. Key challenges faced by healthcare informatics in London
6. Issues while implementing healthcare informatics
7. Issues while implementing healthcare informatics in UK
8. Issues while implementing healthcare informatics in London
9. Global issues while implementing healthcare informatics
10. Advantages of implementing healthcare informatics in the system
11. Benefits of healthcare informatics to the healthcare system

All these key words were used in order to search for quality data related healthcare informatics and relevant research data were used to develop analysis and outcome of such results.

A secondary research is used to collect data which is already being done by other primary researchers.

Key advantages of secondary research are,

• Information is readily available and quick access to the information is possible with the help of secondary research
• Helps in guiding the focus of any primary research being conducted
• It becomes easy to develop structured study and analysis
• Sometimes authentic reports from government sources are available which however are difficult to collect if conducted individually.

Key disadvantages of carrying out secondary research are,

• Information is difficult to be authenticated.
• Wide variety of information being collected may be out of the scope of the study
• Data may be outdated or information may be obsolete which becomes irrelevant to be used for present study.
• Information collected is dependent on the primary research done by other primary researchers.

Basic purpose of doing secondary research,

1. Access is easy
2. Low cost
3. Quick knowledge
4. Rules out irrelevant data out of the scope of research hypothesis or research question.

Secondary research is always advantageous when time is less to conduct a study. Less effort is involved in carrying out the study and the research is developed in time with less effort.

Secondary research helps in accumulating and analyzing the data which otherwise takes lot of time, effort and money. Sometimes it’s out of the scope of particular research to use money in order t develop research analysis or research study design.

Secondary research helps in saving the cost and developing relevant research in order to complete the task under the given scope of the research design or research study.

During secondary research relevant research papers were available which helped in developing this paper effectively. Updated government reports were available which helped in adding updated information in the present report.

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