Healthcare Informatics and Information System

In 2002 a summit was held regarding Health Profession Education

-its goal is to assist the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to develop strategies to ensure that educational systems for health professionals were consistent with the 21st century health care system

- reports stated that doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health care professionals are not adequately prepared to provide highest quality and safest medical care.

-to meet this challenge, educators, licensing and certification organization ensures that students, working professionals develop and maintain

the 5 core point areas:1. patient centered care2. interdisciplinary teams3. evidence based practice4. quality improvement 5. informatics

IOM wants health care professionals to be computer, information and informatics literateAmerican Health Information Mgt. Assoc.(AHIMA) and American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) focused on the education of the health care workforce

This call was answered by the American Nursing Assoc. (ANA), National League of Nurses and the American Assoc. of Colleges of Nursing (AACN)- they identified informatics competencies that are required for all Nurses which were categorized into 3 overall areas1. computer literacy2. information literacy3. professional development/leadership

Definition of some Healthcare Informatics and Related Terms1.Health Care Informatics- the study of how healthcare data, information, knowledge and wisdom are collected, stored, processed, communicated and used to support the process of health care delivery to clients, providers, administrators and organizations involved in the healthcare delivery.

-concerned with the application of information and computer science concepts and theories to the delivery of health care. It is and interdiciplinary science delopedt from integration of information science, computer science, and health care sciences.

2. Information Science- focuses on the study of information generation, transmission and use.Originated from the study of Shannon and Weaver (1949) theory of information – focuses on communication of information. Transmission of message from a sender to a receiver and the standard used in teaching communication concepts to health care providers.

Blum further established this theory in giving historical overview of computers in health care. He grouped medical applications according to objects they processed namely;1. data processing2. information processing3. knowledge processingUsing Blum’s model Graves and Corcoran(1989) “The Study of Nursing Informatics”proposed that it should include:

- 4.Nursing Data information and5.knowledge and later the same year Nelson and Joos (1989) added wisdom to this continuum

3. Data- these are raw facts-exists w/o meaning or interpretation-these are attributes that healthcare professional collects, organize and name. -can be interpreted in many different ways4. Information-collection of data that has been processed to produce meaning.Different techniques to process data1. classifying2. sorting3. organizing4. summarizing5. graphing6. calculating

There are also factors that can influence the interpretation of data.1. education2. attitudes3. emotions4. goals-Information System is a system that processes data, organize the various information, organizing the various elements into meaningful unit of information.

5. Knowledge- a collection of interrelated pieces of information and data.Knowledge base is the organized collection of interrelated information about a specific topic

6. Wisdom- knowing when and how to use ethical decision making that ensures cost-effective quality care requires wisdom