Informatics is the study and practice of science and technology. It is a practice of creating, storing, finding, manipulating and sharing information (Ong, 2014). Informatics turns data and information into knowledge that people can use everyday. In today’s world informatics is the bridge to all useful things; it helps to shape our relationships, our organizations and our world. Informatics is an every changing field. It uses computer science to help analyze big issues especially within healthcare. People using informatics are able to help solve problems that directly impact our lives and our society. We use informatics within healthcare. Health informatics is an evolving specialty that links information technology, communications and healthcare to improve the quality and safety of patient care. Health informatics allows health information management professionals to gather and analyze large amounts of data into useful information.
Theory of Informatics
There are many complex theories to explain informatics. To begin to explain this, information is power and technology helps to facilitate by affording ways to provide patient education, teaching, learning and to provide general health promotion and prevention information on a global scale. In theory we are combining science, computer science, information science and cognitive science all together. As a multidisciplinary health care, informatics is pulling all theories and knowledge bases together. According to
However, health informatics is the kind of application system normally used by most hospitals and clinics to deliver high quality and cost efficient healthcare service to the community. According to Bacon County Hospital press release (2002), the informatics system was implemented to make the delivery of medical services such as surgical treatment and other general treatment faster. In this paper, therefore we look into how the informatics systems/applications has evolved since it was implemented by the Bacon County Hospital; discuss the future trends for healthcare informatics and how these trends impact the healthcare delivery system.
Dr. Murray’s article states that nursing informatics is the combination of sciences; computer, information and nursing which helps to “manage and process nursing data, information and knowledge to support the practice of nursing and the delivery of care” (Murray, 2010, p. 3). Collecting information while
Informatics is the science of the management of information. It includes different techniques on how the information is collected, stored, utilized and sent to other locations or transmitted. Informatics utilizes computers to process this information. Clinical informatics is also known as health informatics. Clinical informatics is the application and integration part of informatics. It takes the information that has been studied and learned and puts it into practice. (Coiera, 2015). Thus supporting best practices amongst organizations and improving the quality of care given. Informatics takes information studied and uses it to improve efficiency of care givers, eases quality improvement measures, and aids in decreasing liability risks (Aston, 2014).
The principal utilization of health informatics began in the 1950s with dental information gathered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Utilization accelerated in subsequent decades which gave a standard programming language to clinical applications. Today, the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) oversees member organizations involved in health informatics worldwide. (Rouse, 2010). The potential for health IT to enhance the safety of health care delivery has been regarded for quite a long time. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act,
Informatics has many possibilities and benefits. The ever growing technology can improve healthcare to protect patients and the medical staff. At Lakeland they use Epic for electronic computer charting, which decreases time to do and increase availability time. With Epic they have designed safety checks to pop up with wrong medication or even different dosage than ordered to prevent medical errors from happening. Now Guardian is slowly being worked into the system to decrease time it take to input vitals for patients. On some units they have a large screen in the huddle room which allows you to click into a patient's chart and focus in on key things. It even has a list screen that helps you to keep track of daily weights, pain reassessments, and I&Os for all patients on that
Demographic shifts in the global population, greater levels of technological disruption due to the Internet, social media and the en masse adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs are together re-defining the healthcare informatics market. System and informatics theories have emerged as the foundational elements of healthcare informatics supported by the Data, Information. Knowledge (DIK) Model which acts as a taxonomy for these developments (Haugh, 2005). Systems and informatics theories along with the DIK Model form the ontological foundations of healthcare informatics field of research occurring today and will continue to provide a basis for further research (Braganza, 2004). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the contributions of systems and informatics, the role of the DIK Model, expert systems in nurse care and medicine, and the use of decision aids and decision support systems. All of these elements are critically important to strategic information systems plans healthcare providers put into place to serve patients while giving healthcare professionals the applications, systems and software they need to excel in their roles (Djellal, Gallouj, 2007).
Their duties include planning the information system, developing the health policy to suit this system and identifying the present and future information requirements. These professionals use informatics to collect, store, use, and transmit information in such a way that the expert, legal, and organizational record keeping needs of the healthcare institutes, are met. They also ensure appropriate collection, management and application of information within the healthcare system for purposes of effective detection of health problems and for identifying inventive solutions to improve health outcomes.
In the relationship of biomedical informatics and its related field, I was able to learn the diverse fields of health informatics, such as medical informatics, bioinformatics, and clinical informatics. I’ve learned that these fields are involved with technology communication system, and they have different types of functions in the health care industries. According to Shortliffe, medical informatics is the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research. As for bioinformatics, the scientific field that study how information is represented and analyzed in the biological system, such as information resulting at
Health informatics is the bridging of computer science, information and the health care field. This interdisciplinary field can be applied to a range of medical fields such as nursing, biomedicine, medicine and subspecialties such as immunology (immunoinformatics). Informatics not only has roles to play in day-to-day areas of immunology such as data storage/retrieval, decision support, standards and electronic health care records but also in research and education such as data mining and simulation systems (Coiera, 2002). Informatics and more specifically, health informatics first started being used in in the late 1950s with the rise of computers (Ho, 2010). Technologies such as computers allowed practitioners and researches
According to AMIA and American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), “Biomedical informatics is the interdisciplinary, scientific field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health” (as cited in Hoyt et al., 2014, p. 4). Biomedical informatics focus not only on clinical, medical and public health fields, but also focuses on dental, nursing, pharmacy, medical imaging and veterinary fields (Hoyt et al., 2014, p. 4).
The work introduces the definition of public health informatics and highlights the various ways that the field has developed. The specific challenges that the field faces has also been emphasized. The latter stages of the report exemplify the concerns that have emerged and the possible future of the field.
Metastructures are concepts which are all encompassing. These concepts are used in theory and in science (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012). The concepts of “data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are used as a framework for understanding clinical information systems and their impact on health care” (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012, p. 97). Through the works of Graves and Concoran, they show a relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. A transformation occurs between each level and with that there is an increase in the complexity which requires a higher level of human intellect for application of concepts to take place (American Nurses Association, 2008). The purpose of this paper will look at a chosen clinical question while using the continuum of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to research this chosen question, to determine if informatics can be used to gain wisdom.
Nursing Informatics is a union of nursing, technology, and data assimilation. Nursing Informatics deals with using technologies to organizing and delivering healthcare in the most efficient and safest manner. Nursing Informatics consist of countless tools ranging from simple computers to the complex electronic medical records systems (EMR), diligently designed to organize and deliver information. Nursing informatics silently streamlined into the management and delivery of healthcare; you have probable used nursing informatics without even knowing it.
Nursing informatics is a branch of nursing or area of specialty that concentrates on finding ways to improve data management and communication in nursing with the sole objective of improving efficiency, reduction of health costs, and enhancement of the quality of patient care (Murphy, 2010). It is also described as a growing area of nursing specialty that combines computer science, information technology, and nursing science in the management and processing of nursing information, data, and knowledge with the sole objective of supporting nursing practice and research. Various nursing theorists have formulated various theoretical frameworks or models related to nursing informatics (Wager, Lee, & Glaser, 2013), and they are defined as a
The profession of health informatics is a relatively new one, blending the use of technologies with collecting, organizing, storing, using, and evaluating health information.