Medical Informatics: Improving Health Care through Information Healthcare informatics is the interdisciplinary study of design, adoption, development and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare industry. The widespread acceptance of medical informatics has helped healthcare providers gain secure and quick access to pertinent patient data. Read along to find out more! The benefits of using healthcare informatics include efficient delivery, cost and quality of healthcare. A multidisciplinary field, healthcare informatics encompasses information about science, systems, technology and healthcare. Health informatics analysis makes use of their expertise to help health care providers manage their resources in a much better way so as to standardize medical care, coordinate research and efficiently deliver healthcare functions.
Let’s take a look at some other important facts describing how healthcare informatics improves medical care:
Streamlining Medical Records Streamlining medical records is one of the best improvements in the medical care industry brought about by healthcare informatics. The medical records, which were primarily being maintained in paper copies, are now being maintained electronically. In fact, whenever any patient visited a specialist, he (specialist) was required to order the patient’s records for thorough consultation. And also the charts were liable to be illegible owing to poor handwriting or mismanagement in arrangement of the record history. The electronic records on the other hand, not only standardize the record keeping systems but also put the information right at the fingertips of the physician – eliminating the waiting time and potential possibilities of error.
Medical Research at Physician’s Fingertips Healthcare informatics makes use of electronic systems to track down the wealth of medical research. Medical research is advancing at a fast pace, but the busy physicians are unable to find the required time to review the on-going developments. In fact, some of the latest advancements in healthcare informatics allow the physicians to simply type in the symptoms or the medical condition to gain access to the all the latest research information about the new treatments and clinical trials available for the particular symptom or disease. This method not only ensures best possible treatment to the patient but also a cutting-edge care.
More Advanced Clinical Trials They help in better organization of various clinical trials. Data trials can now be tracked down and viewed in automatically, eliminating the need of lengthy data analysis and bewildering hand-calculations. This helps physicians monitor recent trends in clinical trials some of which they may not have even noticed earlier. This also helps in prevention of any scope of clinical errors in data calculations. Also, the combination of record keeping systems and clinical trial data can help physicians identify patients who could be apt candidates for clinical trials.
Patients Can Now Act As Their Own Advocates The rise of healthcare informatics has not only helped physicians, but it has also proved quite beneficial for the patients by assisting them to take charge of their own health. Then be it the availability of online health related data or online forms of based on patient information - people today have more access to information related to their health than ever before. This information not only helps patients to seek preventive care but also assists in identifying early health problems to opt for alternative treatment options. All this ultimately results into better patient health outcomes.
About the Owner: Dr. Jim Evans practices emergency medicine in Virginia and Maryland. He is the managing director of Sentinel MED. He oversees a team of medical escorts that is selected for their experience and knowledge of international medicine and that deploy globally.
He has
worked for a large global medical assistance company for the last decade, providing both direction for the medical cases and being the medical escorts for our patients who are ill or injured while away from home.
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