Introduction
The quality of healthcare care and the treatment directly depends on the performance of nurses and other medical professionals, their skills and knowledge. To maintain clinical staff in a strained healthcare environment and prevent possible errors that may occur in daily workflow, many medical organizations implement various health information systems (HIS), such as CDSS, EHR, and CPOE. Hence, this presentation aims at discussing and evaluating the impacts of HIS on the quality of medical care, including patient-centered care, by describing how HIS affects the nursing process and a culture of safety. Besides, the presentation will discuss the importance of compliance with HIPAA Security and Privacy and evaluate the usefulness of two emerging technologies in the healthcare environment and their role in improving healthcare overall.
HIS’s Impact on Patient-centered Care
Patient-centered care implies active patients’ participation in their medical treatment in close interaction with their physicians to achieve desirable results in patients’ recovery and prevention of diseases. In this context, HIS supplies patients with relevant information about their current health status and actions that facilitate recovery or prevent the further aggravation of a particular disease. In addition, it aids patients in maintaining an immediate connection with their doctors, and, in case of need, patients can reach out to their medical professionals to clarify tangled situations or receive advice (Sutton et al., 2020). Last, HIS provides patients with alerts and reminders about necessary measures and actions that should be taken, especially in critical situations.
Benefits of Health Information System
Currently, the healthcare industry has gained an enormous boost from modern technologies, especially from computerized HIS. First, clinical providers have easy and rapid access to complete and reliable information about patients’ histories, namely, specific symptoms, tests, analysis, allergies, which facilitate a more accurate and faster diagnosis and therapeutic decision-making process (Halcom, 2017). Second, HIS enables medical staff and professionals to use relevant and necessary information from various databases, supplying them with practical reminders and information about drug interactions, for instance (Sutton et al., 2020). In addition, HIS reduces the likelihood of errors made in the clinical workflow and aids in identifying and correcting different problems. Finally, HIS promotes close and active cooperation between clinicians and patients and, in the case of need or even emergency, allows doctors or nurses to connect with patients and clarify particular issues.
Effects the Nursing Process
As immediate caregivers, nurses are on the frontline of patient care and, thus, face numerous challenges and experience a great deal of stress in their practices. In this regard, HIS supports medical staff in terms of documentation since, presently, nurses can input notes into electronic systems such as electronic health records, thereby keeping a patient’s medical history up-to-date (“The impact of health informatics”). Besides, contemporary practice management systems promote scheduling and billing by arranging and automating many daily operations and administrative tasks. Another system, such as CDS, equips nurses with reminders regarding necessary and right actions and decisions. Last, communication is also reinforced by HIS since the connection can be maintained all day round through online service.
Effects on Culture of Safety
Patient safety is the principal task to which hospitals and medical organizations give the highest priority since it is an integral index of care service and effective treatment. In this context, HIS, especially CPOE combined with CDSS, allows for preventing human-related errors regarding drug-drug interaction, drug allergies, and providing drug control during the whole inpatient treatment (Sutton, 2020). Moreover, the system equips nurses and clinicians with relevant guidelines and patients’ records. Finally, HIS, CDSS in particular, has a reminder system that can be used, for example, for timely measurement of blood glucose to avert hypoglycemia cases (Sutton, 2020). This system is also applied for ensuring that a patient takes the right medicine with the correct dosage at the prescribed or appropriate time.
CDS and EHR
Older models of medical records often complicate the work of medical staff and prevent the effective dissemination of necessary information, which leads to errors and slows down the provision of medical care. EHR is specifically designed to replace the conventional paper variant of a patient’s medical history, providing staff and clinicians with person-specific data about prescribing and preadmission tests, analysis, diseases, list of allergies, interventions, among others. CDS, in its turn, is an instrument developed to aid healthcare providers in therapeutic decision-making by sorting, filtering, and analyzing valid and relevant information from different clinical and administrative databases (Sutton, 2020). Information obtained by this system helps predict adverse medical incidents and facilitates diagnoses.
HIPAA Security and Privacy Rules
To provide confidentiality and integrity of all electronic health information, the administration of an organization should accept a policy that adheres to HIPAA and HITECH data security requirements. This policy must establish clear rules of access to the information through application personal passwords and advanced encryption of data. Additionally, personal web pages should have a direct connection to corresponding users’ gadgets to notify about all interventions, issues, or changes overall. Medical organizations and facilities should introduce severe penalties for violation of rules of the determined policy (“HIPAA and HITECH Data Security Requirements”, n.d.). Finally, an organization should have reserve databases to provide backup data storage and install appropriate software that ensures restoring lost information to prevent irretrievable information loss.
Nanomedicine
Nanomedicine is a contemporary science engaged in the application of miniature molecule-sized devices for therapeutic, preventive, and diagnostic objectives. Primarily, nanotechnologies, nanosensors, in particular, can be utilized for imaging the internal body organs, which use a light source or/and camera (Bajwa, 2014). This allows for detecting severe diseases at a primordial level by monitoring their development and providing a more in-depth examination of a patient’s healthcare status. Moreover, it offers ample potential for fast and effective treating disease, including cancer, or infection illness, tissue regeneration, controlling the release of enzymes, hormones, or other body-related chemicals at the determined volumes and sites.
Medical Tricorder
Medical tricorder is an advanced multifunction handheld tool, which comes in handy for a wide range of consumers, providing medical non-invasive procedures with high accuracy. It can be used by both medical-specialized workers and ordinary people for measuring blood pressure, electrocardiography, body temperature, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation (Lasbury, 2016). Thus, this device can be vital in the diagnosis of various diseases, including anemia, diabetes, urinary tract and respiratory infections, stroke, among others. In this regard, medical tricorder will facilitate the treatment and preventive process and workflow for all stakeholders, including clinicians, staff, and patients
Technologies for Benefits for the Use of Nursing Informatics
Both medical nanodevices and tricorders can be directly connected to various HIS, primarily to CDSS and EHR. In the first case, the visualized and detailed data obtained from nanosensors can be transferred to and stored in EHR with further analysis by CDSS. Such a procedure will provide better medical decision-making and facilitate the diagnostic of patients. Likewise, most of the present medical tricorders are attached to mobile apps. Having this device at hand, nurses and clinicians can track and control the course of a particular disease by repeatedly taking multiple vital metrics and reacting to any adverse changes appropriately and in due time.
References
Bajwa, M. (2014). Emerging 21st-century medical technologies. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, 30(3), 649.
Halcom, J.B. (2017). 5 Ways EHR software improves quality patient care. The Becker’s Hospital Review. Web.
HIPAA and HITECH Data Security Requirements. (n.d.). Henry Schein MicroMD. Web.
Lasbury, M. (2017). The realization of Star Trek Technologies: The Science, not fiction, behind brain implants, plasma shields, quantum computing, and more. Springer International Publishing.
Sutton, R. T., Pincock, D., Baumgart, D. C., Sadowski, D. C., Fedorak, R. N., & Kroeker, K. I. (2020). An overview of clinical decision support systems: Benefits, risks, and strategies for success. NPJ Digital Medicine, 3(1), 1-10.
The impact of health informatics on nursing practice (n.d.). The University of Illinois at Chicago. Web.