HA 3970 April 04, 2020

Oumme Rushaa Sairally

Final Exam Paper

Health Info System

Dr. Aaron Baird

How can health IT be applied toward reducing the incidence of disease, improving

health care, and/or health outcomes?

The topic I want to cover is interoperability in the field of health information technology

and how it is used to reduce the spread of the covid19 epidemic and improve its outcome. First, I

want to introduce a little bit of both subjects. Covid19 is an epidemic that we are struggling with

as of 2020. This comes from a large family of viruses that can cause the common cold, severe

respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV). It is

recognized as a zoonotic virus which means it can be transmitted and extremely infectious

between humans and animals. The signs are fever, cough, shortness of breath, trouble breathing,

pneumonia, inflectional kidney failure and can even lead to death. The reason why it is so

dangerous is that a person who is already infected when cough or sneeze, will spread this disease

through the respiratory droplets produced. Anyone nearby will become contaminated by inhaling

these droplets into their lungs.

According to the Our World in Data, Covid19 has affected about 3 million people and

killed 234,105 people so far worldwide. Just in the US only, 1 million people are affected, and

63,861 are dead including people of all ages, but especially the elderly and they predicted that it

will increase in the near future. The use of whatever resources and tools they have must help

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improve the situation is important for Health Information Technology and I will talk about how

interoperability helps to do that. We have talked a lot in this course about what Interoperability is

and what its function is. In the healthcare industry interoperability is used cohesively as an aid in

the interpretation, exchange, and use of data. After the introduction of the American Recovery

and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), all healthcare industries have been encouraged to move from

paper to electronic health records, and this is where interoperability has become very important

for information sharing as interactions between different EHRs started to become a barrier in

healthcare settings (Contimuum). This is also the reason why I chose this topic because as we go

into the future, we will see an increasingly amount of technological and digital use in the

healthcare field. Most doctor’s office and public health facility uses EHR systems or some sort of

technology to work or as a mean of communication. The generation that we are living in, is

mostly familiar and easily adapted to technology. That reminds me of John's Snow

major Cholera outbreak in England Soho in 1854, that's exactly what caused so many people to

die because there wasn't enough Health IT knowledge to fix the problem quick enough. It took a

long time for Snow to investigate and find the source of the outbreak. This demonstrates

precisely why interoperability is so critical in our period.

The data sharing policy and standards would require data to be exchanged among

doctors, laboratories, hospitals, pharmacies, and patients irrespective of the software or software

vendors. The key point is that it would define the data structure automatically without altering it

in any way and place it in a consistent format where it is simple to understand at the individual

field level. There are many different types of standard (common languages that are used) such as

LOINC, SNOMED, and ICD-10CM that are adopted by many medical labs and are provided free

now due to Covid-19 (HealthiT.gov. 2020). The way I see it is that without EHR systems

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monitoring public health would be a challenging task because they would not, of course, be able

to control covid19 tracking in populations especially since it is worldwide and detect any small

changes occurring with the disease in order to avoid a sudden outbreak periodically or modify

the disease epidemiology. Therefore, the Center for Disease and Control, the World Health

Organization, and many other public health laboratories rely on interoperability to make it easier

to access the data of patients and work with and prevent the problem from getting worse.

Due to the harmful nature of the virus, the Covid-19 calls for the exchange of patient

information very easily and efficiently. When it comes to what needs to be done to better control

the outbreak, time is a very significant factor. One of the challenges that the US is facing is that

Covid-19 spreads too rapidly and lacking health IT technology is the main factor, so how can all

these important information be transmitted or integrated into the system so that health care

professionals can use it to care for these patients at the right time. According to HIT

Infrastructure on April 3rd of the year 2020, “A leading internet and information services

company announced that it will offer healthcare providers free access to on-demand patient

record queries through its healthcare interoperability platform during the COVID-10 Pandemic”

(Samantha McGrail, 2020). They also announced that a platform called consensus will be

released and free of charge, and it allows the data of patients to be retrieved very easily and to be

kept securely on past and current conditions and treatment delivered in the healthcare community

around them. These physicians will be provided with a dashboard to control both their incoming

and outgoing patient documents along with cloud faxes, direct secure messaging, patient query,

and integration of APIs into Interoperability platform exchanges.

This, in turn, would help health care professionals make better choices at the point of care

because, until now, front liners, in particular, was unable to gather data quickly and efficiently

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determine the level of the acuteness of the patient so that they could be prioritized due to the

higher risk of chronic conditions. This problem may have endangered the life of the patient due

to the lack of critical information and the time it takes to obtain the information can lead to a

greater risk to the patient and cause an inconvenience. We can see how interoperability through

the Consensus tool can assist health care providers in providing patients with adequate services

when they have the correct knowledge in the right place at the right time. This is called receiving

good quality care as an outcome from the implementation of the new system in the healthcare

industry. It reduces the amount of duplicative work that health care professionals would be doing

if they did not have these results or information for those patients readily accessible, and thereby

reduces the amount of time that a physician would spend with the patient because of the latter.

I assume it benefits not only from the side of healthcare staff but also from the side of

patients. Patient can also have access some of these tools which makes them have access to their

own information online where they can view their test results, speak to a nurse or even

communicate with a staff member concerning their health concern. Instead of having a health

representative to spend the time with the patient explaining one by one, the patient can do that on

his or her own thus reducing the administrative work from the staff. Covid-19 is so infectious

that people are forced to stay six feet away from each other. This makes it much worse for the

community because the risk of spreading when they come in contact is much higher and it also

stops them from going to the doctors or emergency services.

I believe that by launching more system like this one, it will enable patient also to have

connection to their health care providers regarding any health concerns. If urgent medical care is

needed, then based on their symptoms, they can be told. On the other hand, I know some

individuals who had symptoms such as the flu and ended up going to the hospital to find out that

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they had allergies. In a case like this, if a person could, for example, use a telehealth system to

interact with a doctor, they would not have to go to the doctor unnecessarily. This is also a safe

way to minimize the Covid-19 incident from spreading at the rate it is now and ideally it will

help lower the number of positive cases as well as encourage people to stay at home rather than

go on unnecessary journeys. These platforms will make a lot of positive changes for the public as

they do not feel helpless and have someone to can go to online in situations like this.

We are currently witnessing the amount of damages this pandemic is causing to the to

people's health worldwide and economic stability. However, I think that Interoperability is a

powerful feature that can a lot for us based on the many reasons how it will boost the outcome

and reduces the number of incidents of Covid-19 patients. This can also benefit the public health

lab when it comes to surveillance system, if these data are up to date and sharable in a small

period it will be a life changing tool. To my understanding, it's not the amount of research that

can be performed, or how much data can be stored in an EHR program, but how it can provide

an effective, less stressful and simple workflow to incorporate patient data. It is about how the

healthcare facility is structured in terms of what knowledge it has and not, or what kind of

arrangements it has in place if they are faced with an epidemic like Covid19. The solution to that

is Interoperability.

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Works Cited

HITInfrastructure. “Interoperability Platform Ensures Access to COVID-19 Patient Data.

“HITInfrastructure, 3 Apr. 2020,

“Interoperability for COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus Pandemic.” Interoperability Standards

Advisory (ISA), www.healthit.gov/isa/covid-19.

Lambert, Daniel. “What Is Interoperability, and What Are the Benefits?” Continuum,

Continuum, 28 June 2018, www.carecloud.com/continuum/what-is-interoperability/.

“Total Confirmed COVID-19 Deaths.” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-

deaths-covid-19.

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