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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Health Information System

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Advanced Information Management and the Application of Technology Advantages and Disadvantages of a Health Information System Health information systems (HIS) are complex and it is helpful to understand advantages and disadvantages to some key components of a HIS. This section will describe the advantages and disadvantages of usability, interoperability, scalability and compatibility. Usability refers to the ability of the user to easily use the HIS. For example, in the hospital setting, one might study the usability of the HIS and how it affects the workflow of a staff nurse. An advantage of superior usability is that the staff nurse is able to document easily with an understanding of technical components. This could increase the …show more content…

Likewise, having a health information system that does not have scalability could mean astronomical costs for an organization that want to grow in size. Another disadvantage may be utter confusion by staff, if a hospital is growing and they must learn an entirely new HIS. Compatibility is the ability for software to work with each other or other devices, such as different versions of software that work with a particular desktop computer (Mastrian &McGonigle, 2017). An advantage of compatibility would be decreasing the risk of error in data entry, since one would be able to minimize the amount of data entry. For example, if a laboratory uses a software system that is compatible with a health information systems, once the result is documented in the lab system, it would be shared and with the HIS and stored in one location. A disadvantage to compatibility is keeping up to date with all current versions of the same software. This can be costly & could result in issue with performance if different versions are running together. Patient Care and Documentation Inevitably, health information systems (HIS) affect both patient care and documentation. Consider the following scenario. A patient with hypertension schedules routine appointments with his primary care physician. At every appointment, the nurse documents the blood pressure reading along with the most updated list of medications that the patient is currently taking. After

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