Journal of eHealth and eWelfare

Running head: INFORMATICS IN THE HEALTHCARE SECTOR
INFORMATICS IN THE HEALTHCARE SECTOR
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

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Electronic Health Records
Electronic Health Record was first validated in the Institute of Medicine’s report in
the year 1991 entitled “The Computer-Based Patient Record: An Essential Technology for
Health Care. It was thought to revolutionize the healthcare system improving the quality of
the same and enhancing safety. The EHR was developed for enhancing the quality, safety as
well as efficiency and was considered to be an effective tool for the physicians. The benefits
of EHR were seen to support the condition of the healthcare sector (Rigby & Ammenwerth,
2016). These were supposed to enhance the productivity as well as bring in improvements in
finance, quality of care improvement and in providing job satisfaction.
Lack of technical knowledge of EHR
Handling EHR requires proper technical knowledge of the staffs in the hospitals. The
staffs in hospitals are in their middle ages and they are not accustomed with the computer
system thus are inefficient in handling the same. The staffs those who are used to with the
paper and pen format are reluctant to adopt the technology. They are not interested in
learning a whole new technology for work purpose (Anand, Pal & Dubey, 2016). Staffs are
reluctant to accept changes within the work environment. This can be seen from the never
ending queue at the counters and this can be attributed wholly to the inefficiency of the staffs
to accept the change or learn the working of the system properly. Even after going through
training sessions they fail to adapt to the system and their inefficiency is clear from the long
queue outside the reception counters.
Effects of implementation of EHR
As per the nurses, the use of EHR decreased the quality of patient care. HIPAA
violation costs from $100 to $1.5 million when reported or detected. The Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act were initiated in the year 1996 and thus the national

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standards for security as well as confidentiality could be set in U.S. Patient care has been
effected by ransomeware attacks in the year 2017, through various malware and other
security access problems on the servers of electronic health record, cost numerous of the
hospitals thousands of dollars per incident (Carney & Kong, 2017). The EHR needs to be
updated at a regular basis and the computer system must be checked for any malware or virus
that can affect the records in the system.
Viewpoint on Charting in EHR
The charting in EHR requires clicking on boxes and thus in this case the disadvantage
is reduced oversight. For instance it can happen that assessment documentation shortcuts may
be to default “normal findings” and the provider may have the provision to make alterations
based on an exam and in this case overlooking any one of the components will make it a false
document (Gray & Sockolow, 2016). In this way frequently repeated documentation can
place the provider at various risks. After the inception of EHR, the patients are of the opinion
that their interaction with the healthcare providers has decreased which gives them a
perception of de-personalization in their healthcare.
Data being tracked by organizations
The past medical history of the patients is another kind of data that is collected so that
their present condition can be analyzed well. The past medical history of the patients needs to
be collected as this will give an idea what they have been through which will help the
healthcare professionals to deal with the preset condition of the patient. This data has a lot of
importance in the medical sector. The data helps doctor to understand the past surgeries or
medication, patients have been through. The past history of a patient has a lot to do with the
present condition of a patient (Ashrafi et al., 2019). Clinical research comprises of collecting
these data and these data are often used to predict the medical conditions of other patients

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who are experiencing similar symptoms. A global organization such as the Clinical Research
Organization is dedicated to management and analysis of data associated with clinical and
postmarketing studies. Clinical data management has a very important part in data collection
phase of clinical level research ensuring compliance and accuracy. Securing clinical data is
essential for maintenance of competitive advantage (Househ et al., 2015). The results of
research, development as well as testing of the diseases of patients are kept a record of in the
clinical trial records. Collection of data helps the healthcare sector for creating holistic views
of different patients, personalizing treatments, advancing the treatment methods, bringing in
improvisations in communication between doctors and patients at the same time enhancing
the health outcomes.
Ethical concerns related to collection of healthcare data
The privacy and confidentiality of these data must be secured so that these data are
not misused. Collecting as well as processing patient data gives rise to ethical concerns
related to patient’s rights, social justice as well as trust in the public institutions. The
collection of data related to the health issue of the patients should be disposed off after a
certain period of time as cyber criminals can make use of these data and trick others. There
are high chances that false reports be generated based on these data and the patients bluffed.
The data can go to wrongs hands if the organization does not take proper measures to
safeguard the data and thus can lead to data breach (Värri et., 2016). The cyber criminals can
make use of the data for various purposes such as by manipulating the reports they can harass
the patients. With advancement in technology it is a fact that data is the greatest weapon that
can destroy organizations. There can be instances that rivals make use of ransomeware and
try to affect the reputation of the organization. In this case it might seem to be the loss of the
organization but actually it is the data of the patients that is at stake. Their data is in hands of
some criminals who can destroy it or do anything they wish to with the same.

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Project selected and its importance
The project that has been selected is Hand Hygiene Tracking System which is very
essential now-a-days when maintaining hygiene plays a vital part. Spreading of healthcare
related infections is considered as one of the serious as well as avoidable threats to the safety
of patients. Thus in this case, monitoring hand hygiene can be a step to ensure that patients
are not getting transmitted with diseases from others. Electronic monitoring system is
considered as the most effective as well as the only passive methods that can be made use of
for increasing hand hygiene. When hand hygiene plays an important factor in prevention of
healthcare associated diseases it can be said that this should be given utmost priority. As per
the studies conducted it has been seen hat hand hygiene has been the reason for many cases
of morbidity and mortality throughout the world (Zillner & Neururer, 2016). Studies suggest
that there is a direct link in between hand hygiene and healthcare associated infections. There
are many hand hygiene compliance systems leaving the customers confused with choices.
The available systems lack in something or other and thus no system can be said to be fully
laced with all the facilities to address the issues related to hand hygiene.
Informatics or healthcare theory
In this case the healthcare theory that can be applied to is information sciences.
Exploitation of the scientific as well as technical informations of different kinds and by all
available means is required in this case. Science and technology should be applied to the
information handling branches that include retrieving information, interaction in between
humans and computer and handling of information within a specific system. Health
Information Science and systems are exciting, new as well as multidisciplinary journal that
focuses on making use of technologies in spheres of computer science that can effectively
assist in diagnosing diseases, treatment and monitoring by the medium of modeling and
management of various health related informations (Aziz, 2017). In case of hand hygiene

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tracking system, information science can help manage the outputs of the system that provide
data about hand hygiene. In this way it can be integrated with hand hygiene to give the users
maximum profitability by using it. The computer science technologies can be made use of for
many different purposes that include information systems, data mining, processing of image,
user interaction and interface and many more. In the hand hygiene tracking system,
information sciences can be integrated so that better results can be obtained. The prevention
of healthcare associated diseases should be given highest priority and thus the system should
be so made that it considers all issues related to the hygiene of hands (Hebda, Hunter and
Czar, 2020). In this system of hand hygiene tracking the intelligence of information science is
required so that the system developed is different from the other systems in the market.
Information science will help in developing a modern system that will be different from the
all other available versions in the market.
Thus from the above discussion it is clear that, informatics in the healthcare sector is
plays an important role in modernizing the systems. Advancements in this sector require that
the healthcare professionals make use of informatics to upgrade their systems and
incorporating technologies such as electronic health records. The hand hygiene tracking
system should be developed considering all the issues that have not be addressed to in the
previous versions. Therefore, it can be said that informatics has a wide range of application in
the healthcare sector.

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References
Anand, T., Pal, R., & Dubey, S. K. (2016, March). Data mining in healthcare informatics:
Techniques and applications. In 2016 3rd International Conference on Computing for
Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom) (pp. 4023-4029). IEEE.
Ashrafi, N., Kuilboer, J. P., Joshi, C., Ran, I., & Pande, P. (2019). Health informatics in the
classroom: An empirical study to investigate higher education's response to healthcare
transformation. Journal of Information Systems Education, 25(4), 5.
Aziz, H. A. (2017). A review of the role of public health informatics in healthcare. Journal of
Taibah University Medical Sciences, 12(1), 78-81.
Carney, T. J., & Kong, A. Y. (2017). Leveraging health informatics to foster a smart systems
response to health disparities and health equity challenges. Journal of biomedical
informatics, 68, 184-189.
Gray, K., & Sockolow, P. (2016). Conceptual models in health informatics research: a
literature review and suggestions for development. JMIR medical informatics, 4(1),
e7.
Hebda, T., Hunter, K. and Czar, P. (2020). Handbook of Informatics. 6th ed. Pearson.
Househ, M. S., Alshammari, R., Almutairi, M., Jamal, A., & Alshoaib, S. (2015, July).
Building a Culture of Health Informatics Innovation and Entrepreneurship: A New
Frontier. In ICIMTH (pp. 237-240).
Rigby, M., & Ammenwerth, E. (2016). The need for evidence in health informatics. Stud
Health Technol Inform, 222, 3-13.

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Värri, A., Blake, R., Roberts, J., Fenton, S. H., Cleary, M., Zacks, S. F., ... & Dougherty, M.
(2016). Transatlantic collection of health informatics competencies. Finnish Journal
of eHealth and eWelfare, 8(2-3), 127-136.
Zillner, S., & Neururer, S. (2016). Big data in the health sector. In New Horizons for a Data-
Driven Economy (pp. 179-194). Springer, Cham.