Health Information Technology: Importance, Usage, and Future

RUNNING HEAD: HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
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HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY1
2. INTRODUCTION
‘Health information technology’ or HIT is a type of information technology used
exclusively to health and the healthcare services (Sittig & Singh, 2015). It guides the health
information management through real time computerized systems and through very secured
health information servers working between the consumers, the providers, the payers, and the
quality monitors. A 2008 report cited series in studies that is conducted in four sites which
deliver ambulation care – 3 of them were United States medical centers, one of it was based
in Netherlands. They found out that ‘electronic health records’ use can obviously be taken as
a very promising tool in improvement of the total quality, the safety and the competence of
different ‘health delivery’ structures. In accordance to the ‘2006 report’ given by ‘Healthcare
Research and Quality agency’, a very wide and very reliable application of the ‘health
information technology’ is bound to certainly recover the health care quality with its
effectiveness. It will also increase health service productivity or its efficiency. The
technology, as supported by the report will help in prevention of medical administration
errors, increase in the ‘healthcare delivery’ the accuracy and other critical ‘procedural related
correctness’. The implementation of HIT can improve healthcare costs, can increase the
administrative efficiencies and the flow of healthcare work. On the overall, it can surely
decrease the amount of paperwork previously done and then eliminate any unproductive, idle
work time that comes to the scene. Extending the real-time feasibility of communications in
health informatics between the healthcare experts can increase access of the reasonable care
to general public. ‘Electronic health record’ also called as ‘EHR’ is the digital kind of
patient’s or subject’s ‘paper chart’ (Singleton et al., 2019). These EHRs are very fast and
actually real-time. They make the patient records and ‘information presence’ very promptly
and very firmly ‘securely’ too to the ‘authorized users’. While EHR do cover medical with
the patient treatment histories but the ‘EHR system’ goes beyond the standardized clinical

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data collection within ‘provider’s office’ - gives a wider perspective of the patient caring. The
electronic ‘health records’ consists of subject’s medical concerns, the history, the ‘diagnoses’,
the ‘medications’, the treatment plans, the ‘immunization dates’, the ‘allergies’, the
‘radiology images’, the laboratory reports with ‘test findings’. They measure evidence-based
instruments to assist the service providers with critical decisions regarding a patient’s care. It
makes the process automated and very streamlined with the workflow. Telemedicine is a
remote delivery process in healthcare services industry, like health assessments and the
consultations within a telecommunications infrastructure (Flodgren et al., 2015). The
mechanism allows the healthcare experts to measure and then diagnose, treat the subjects
within the framework of same technology, through video conferencing, through smartphones,
without any actual sort of real visit.
2.1 IMPORTANCE OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Healthcare information paces up feasibility of ‘health service delivery’, elevates the
patient safety, reduces ‘medical errors’ and then also reinforces a communication of the
patients, with the ‘healthcare service providers’. The OpenMRS community addresses the
system and healthcare needs by facilitating the ‘Open Medical Record System’ which is the
‘open-source’ form of the ‘electronic health recording platform’. This OpenMRS is planned
specifically for the low-economic settings, and is free of cost at the same time (Morris &
Fernandez, 2019). The ‘Health Information Exchange’ also called as ‘HIE’ is also cardinal at
it perhaps has certain benefits like improvement of the healthcare safety, the quality and the
patient related outcomes (Wisser et al., 2019). The Health information exchange or the HIE
improves organizational patient servicing quality by reducing the medication prescription,
administration and other life threatening medical errors (Peterson et al., 2016). HIT engage
patients by increasing the patient participation in own health caring and by reducing the time,
a patient or subject spends on paper works and other document filling. The health information

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systems aid the community Health services by supporting and directing the public health
officers in improvement of community health. HIT systems needs health information
technology education and it provide very pragmatic insights to the system assessment, to
monitor the system development and to aid different health administrations measure their
daily and annual performance. Health information technology education or simply health
information education (HIE) must be imparted to every health care staff working in an
organization so as to ease the level of intra and inter departmental communications. The
‘health information technology’ is vital to healthcare as it solves problems like hectic
repetitive searching through the patient files, confusion with patient identification and clinical
information, complexities arisen due to mixed information of demographics and health
conditions (Wachter, 2016). Repetitive and delayed searching of data is common in various
health settings and it is time consuming, hazardous and is a huge block or barrier to a fast-
paced acute setting or emergency department. The level of usage was found to be diverse in
regards to timing of patient encounter. The healthcare information system can help sort,
assort, organize data in the very technologically strident manner and make the data available
to health staffs in a very systematic manner. HIT provides the right mix and fluency of data
availability and communication terrain inside the hospitals, the emergency medical
departments, the medical socio groups, the ‘insurers’, the ‘laboratories’, the ‘public health
agencies’, chronic care specialties (Lyon et al., 2016). The HIT education and system access
should be given to the nurses, the ‘registration clerks’, the ‘social workers’, the ‘office
managers’, the ‘executives’, and the ‘public health-workers’ (Rolls et al., 2016). Making the
use of healthcare information universal should begin at first, at a national level and each
hospital should be funded and supported well in order to incorporate the health care
information systems in a very synchronized and functional way. Even the policy makers and