How Informatics can help Health care Providers

How Informatics can help Health care Providers

Health informatics can help health care providers to overcome current barriers to care and increase access to safe, quality health care by ensuring effective communication and management of information among providers and patients. Health informatics comprises advanced medical technology that enhances medical procedures, helps in planning treatment, and facilitates data recording. It also enhances the overall effectiveness and quality of health care by refining the retrieval of patient records, identification of possible prescription errors or harmful treatment, enhancing the safety of patient data, and enhancing the accuracy of health insurance (Koutoukidis & Stainton, 2020).

The use of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) are associated with various values and challenges in the provision of safe care. The values of CPOE include reduction of errors by ensuring providers generate legible, standardized, and complete orders. The build-in CDSS within the CPOE can automatically verify medical allergies, drug interactions, and other probable issues (Carli et al., 2018). These tools can also enhance efficiency by enabling providers to convey orders electronically and also help in quick access to radiology, laboratory, and medication orders. On the other hand, the challenges associated with the use of CDSS and CPOE include high cost of implementation, difficulty in learning new and intricate software and the associated reduction in productivity, security threats, and the disparity between the perception of providers and the recognized workflow in the systems.

Heuristic principles are important for efficient clinical information systems such as CPOE and CDSS by enabling inspection of the systems to identify problems in usability. Assessing the principles is vital in ensuring compliance with standards of usability. The heuristic principles are also crucial in ensuring the system matches the real-world applications by ensuring language, concepts, words, and phrases are familiar to both users and the systems (Carayon & Hoonakker, 2019).

References

Carayon, P., & Hoonakker, P. (2019). Human factors and usability for health information technology: old and new challenges. Yearbook of medical informatics, 28(1), 71. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1677907

Carli, D., Fahrni, G., Bonnabry, P., & Lovis, C. (2018). Quality of decision support in computerized provider order entry: a systematic literature review. JMIR medical informatics, 6(1), e7170. https://doi.org/10.2196/medinform.7170