Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Health informatics: Improving patient care
    Health informatics: Improving patient care
    Health informatics: Improving patient care
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Health informatics: Improving patient care

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Health informatics (HI) and technology play a major role in health care including empowering patients, shortening waiting lists and improving treatment efficiency. This ebook contains a range of material by HI experts on the latest developments. It includes articles on robotic surgery, on how technology can support people in their own homes, and on how electronic systems can help reduce risk of medical error. Readers do not require a detailed understanding of health care or health informatics.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
    Release dateJun 29, 2012
    ISBN9781780171449
    Health informatics: Improving patient care

    Related to Health informatics

    Related ebooks

    Medical For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Opinion: Electronic Health Records Are Still Waiting To Be Transformed

      Apr 11, 2019

      Electronic health records aren't yet a transformative tool to support clinical decision-making. Many physicians feel they have traded physical filing cabinets for digital ones.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: Advice For HIMSS: Put Patients And Their Caregivers At The Center Of Your Universe

      Feb 11, 2019

      Improving clinicians' workflows is a great goal. But HIMSS and heath IT folks also need to harness information so patients can take better care of themselves.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Disrupting the Healthcare System

      Jan 1, 2020

      What are the biggest wicked problems in healthcare right now? There are several, and from my perspective they are driven by two factors. The first is that there are so many stakeholders involved, which often means that there is no one ‘right’ solutio

      7 min read

    • Article

      Digitalising SA’s Health Services Is The Way To Go

      Jun 17, 2023

      Digital health, underpinned by novel and improved technology, holds immense power and potential as a vehicle to achieve the common goal of better health care for everyone. This is the view of health practitioners who recently gathered at the Houghto

      2 min read

    • Article

      Expanding Precision Medicine

      Jul 30, 2020

      Expanding Precision Medicine
      9 min read

    • Article

      Emerging Technologies

      Aug 2, 2021

      Emerging Technologies
      3 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: Scribes Can Help Transform Health Care By Creating Better Clinical Data

      Aug 7, 2019

      Scribes are the last piece in the 25-year puzzle to remake health care. The data they create will power analytics to overthrow the High Priests of Status Quo.

      4 min read

    • Article

      NHS England’s Plans For Use Of Our Personal Data Leaves Me Very Worried

      Jun 1, 2021

      NHS England’s use and sharing of confidential data is starting to look positively sinister to me, and no, this is far from an outbreak of tin foil hat paranoia on my part. Let me explain. Deep in the bowels of NHS Digital’s website you will find det

      5 min read

    • Article

      Transforming Healthcare

      Mar 8, 2022

      Technology has disrupted nearly every industry, but one sector that has lagged behind is healthcare. Despite the transformation of everything from how we travel and communicate to the way we order groceries and perform banking tasks, healthcare has b

      3 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: Trustworthy Data From Consumer Health Devices Can Help Solve Stubborn Health Care Challenges

      Jul 9, 2019

      Clinicians, researchers, and innovators need to collaborate on data integrity now, before bad consumer-generated data undermine consumer health devices and medicine.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Doctor Amazon

      Dec 13, 2019

      Doctor Amazon
      12 min read

    • Article

      Doctor Amazon

      Dec 13, 2019

      Doctor Amazon
      12 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: How One Pharmaceutical Company Is Reinventing The Clinical Trial

      Sep 21, 2018

      It's time to make clinical trials more rewarding for patients and investigators, and speed the delivery of new therapies. Here's how one company is doing that.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: Covid-19 Will Be The Ultimate Stress Test For Electronic Health Record Systems

      Mar 12, 2020

      Just as the levees of New Orleans stood little chance against the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, our overly complex, inflexible, noninteroperable, and often off-purpose electronic health record systems aren't ready…

      5 min read

    • Article

      Value Creation in Healthcare

      Sep 1, 2019

      You worked as a leader on the front lines in healthcare for more than 20 years. In your view, what is the industry’s greatest challenge? One of the greatest healthcare challenges is leading transformation within a culture that has been pretty static

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Sector’s Key Growth Areas

      Nov 26, 2021

      • Telehealth: facilitating virtual health interactions between patients and professionals. Covid-19 triggered a huge boost in patients going online for support, and this will transform how primary healthcare is delivered to patients over the long ter

      1 min read

    • Article

      Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You. That Could Raise Your Rates

      Jul 18, 2018

      "Oceans of data" — including highly personal data — may be fed into calculations for setting your health insurance cost.

      12 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Health informatics

    3/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I thought it was ok . . . . .

    Book preview

    Health informatics - BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    Health care is very much an information business. Administering health care was the subject of many early systems. It was not long after the first computers appeared that they were being used to support the finance function at the London Hospital. Things have come a long way since those days and still have far to go. Use of computers to support the clinical care of patients is a more recent phenomenon, but one that is obvious if you think about it. Much of health care deals with the collection of symptoms and results of tests to form a diagnosis. The formulation of a plan and its implementation involves the collection and recording of much information.

    The recent Health and Social Care Act 2012 initiates major changes to the NHS, giving responsibility for commissioning health services for local populations largely to GPs in Commissioning Care Groups. These changes aim to create productivity improvements in the health and care of populations by ensuring more integrated care across a range of settings from home to hospital care, where different providers contribute to the overall integrated pathway of care for a patient. This can only be achieved satisfactorily by using information and information systems to transform the productivity and economics of the NHS; improving the quality of care, its outcomes and the health of the population.

    This briefing is aimed at presenting just a few of the many innovative ways in which information systems and technology are being used to support health care. Matthew Swindells, Chair of BCS Health, points out in the first article that ‘the challenge is to IT-enable the whole system, not just the silos: stepping out of our narrow institutional interests and finding a way to deliver benefits for the population, the patient, the NHS and its staff.’ He describes the five pillars on which this should be based to achieve success.

    You will find articles on robotic surgery and radiotherapy targeting showing how informatics is being applied in leading-edge clinical treatment of patients. ‘Telehealth: for better patient care’ and ‘Smart textiles’ focus on how technology can support people in their own homes and avoid the need for expensive hospital care.

    It is well documented that patients are harmed and killed by medical errors with about 1 in 10 patients being affected in some way. In ‘Safety first’, Dr Paul Shannon explains how ‘electronic systems, wisely designed and implemented, can help reduce risks in a variety of ways.’

    As the number of different providers of health care to individual patients increases, the need to integrate care and information from different sources also increases. This risks greater fragmentation, potentially leading to more, rather than less, medical errors. Researchers William Buchanan and Christoph Thuemmler of Edinburgh Napier University talk about their approach to this complex problem using the latest innovations in cloud computing.

    Janet Sampson from the Welsh Blood Service describes how other areas of health care computing can learn from the strict validation procedures they must apply for new computing systems. This becomes increasingly important where information is crossing organisational boundaries in order to provide a complete picture for a patient.

    If you need any convincing of how exciting health informatics can be and want to be inspired, read Justin Richards’ interview with Dr Julie Greensmith: ‘A real rollercoaster ride’. Part of the Intelligent Modelling and Analysis Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, she describes how she got into this domain and what she is working on.

    The line up is completed by Andy Savvides describing the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model; Margaret Cosens and Keith Richardson on the application of speech recognition and digital dictation; Paul Chapman on how the implementation of an electronic patient record at NHS Rotherham has led to shorter waiting lists and productivity; and Carol Bond on how the internet has transformed information for patients, the public and health care professionals.

    While we cannot hope to cover the sheer variety of areas in health care where information technology is already making an impact or the complex and exciting areas still to be tackled, we hope that these articles give you some insight into the domain. They are aimed at an audience that does not require detailed understanding of health care or health informatics.

    Sheila Bullas

    Vice Chair Publications

    BCS Health

    1 USING IT TO IMPROVE POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT

    At the annual conference of the Primary Health Care Specialist Group, Matthew Swindells, Chair, BCS Health, talked about the changes that have been brought in by the recent Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the implications this has for informatics.

    The Health and Social Care Act 2012 hands commissioning of health services over to ‘clinical commissioning groups’ largely run by GPs. As the Chair of the NHS Commission Board, Malcolm Grant, said: ‘The best clinical commissioning groups will be those with the best information systems.’ There is, therefore, an obligation on those who work in the area of health informatics in general and those in primary care informatics in particular to step up to this challenge.

    Traditionally health care has stood

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1