Why Health Informatics Is So Important To Healthcare

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The question we must clear up before we go any further is what probably most people who are beginning to read our articles here at Sudir Raju’s Blog is, what exactly is health informatics? What is the meaning of the concept and how it applies to improve our idea of healthcare by helping patients, doctors and the industry itself to become better everyday at doing what is meant to accomplish, making life for people more comfortable and of better quality.

Informatics in healthcare refers to a field that brings together many different disciplines by using health information technology to make healthcare better and more efficient, looking to lower the costs incurred and thus making it availability more common. The actual definition as given by the National Library of Medicine states that Health Informatics is "the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, adoption and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning". In summary we can safely say that informatics studies resources and methods to best manage health information, and that includes Electronic Health Records or EHR, Electronic Medical Records or EMR, as well as health information exchange standards and medical terminology used, nomenclature, clinical terms and the use of devices with the intent of collecting health data in a portable fashion.

Professionals in the field can make a real different in the life patients and they can be there besides health care providers and administrators finding ways to set standards by which electronic should be managed, educating the parties involved on how electronic record issues could be handled, working as advocates for quality and standard compliance when it comes to the security and privacy of patients information, providing the best information to support decision making in clinical matters and last but not least, being involved in several different steps when it comes to auditing, quality assessment of information and risk management in all matters having to deal with clinical research and new developments in mobile health.

People often see healthcare as the actions and services provided and being performed by those who are at the forefront of the medical field. People like nurses, doctors, technicians and physician’s assistants are not the only ones who greatly impact patient care. Support personnel play an important role shaping healthcare and with the essential nature that information technology has gained, it is now more than ever that people with the set of skills that are needed to navigate this field, are needed. Accurate recording and interpretation of data is absolutely indispensable to help people in the field and even policy makers in healthcare to find problems in the system and find ways to correct them. Also, that information in invaluable when it comes to finding solutions to those problems and to locate the areas that can benefit most from their impact.

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One of the most important areas in which health informatics shows the need the industry has for professionals in this field, is in electronic patient records. It is a fact that people no longer receive their entire treatment from just one professional, instead they see more than one healthcare provider and this can be a nightmare when it comes to keeping track of paper records that work as evidence of their medical history. It is incredibly safe and convenient to use electronic health record systems to help keep information regarding their visits to different physicians, specialists, hospitals, healthcare facilities, laboratories and more. These records allow patients the peace of mind that comes from not having to summarize their entire medical history every time they visit a new doctor and they also help providers have access to the relevant information that patients may forget or simply dismiss as unimportant. All of these factors reduce paperwork, speed up the process, relieve stress and more importantly, ensure patients that the staff at the facility is already prepared and with all the necessary resources to give the best possible service during their treatment.

The reduction of costs across the board is another huge reason for more investment in health informatics. Medical errors are said to cost the United States close to $40 billion year and health informaticians are extremely effective helping the industry reduce such errors. On one side, they are great at creating solutions that reduce menial work that takes up labor hours that could be better using helping patients and reducing pressure placed on providers; likewise the practices of health informatics are also very effective at reducing the amount of lab work that needs to be done, thus reducing costs of taking samples and running analysis that don't need to me repeated each time. Health informatics reduce operating costs and also significantly reduce insurance premiums, something that passes down immediately as savings to patients and a better work environment of health professionals and others involved in the industry.