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Health Informatics

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Health Informatics
Healthcare is essential for the progress of a country. If the population is healthy it produces more and the economy rises. We all want to be healthy and live longer. Therefore, we all make contributions, one way or another, to make the healthcare one of the most information intensive sector of the United States economy. Nowadays, not only doctors and research institutions are the ones providing healthcare information. Advances in communication, such as the Internet, have made, and will continue to make, available millions of healthcare informational sources to the population. But, what is happening with all these information?

Clearly, since decades ago, healthcare professionals have been worrying about the quality of the healthcare information and how effective the policies and procedures established for the management and analysis of clinical data followed by healthcare professional are. In the 1961 EMR video, a study was presented in order to analyze the possibility of eliminating the paperwork or part of the paperwork in a hospital. Yes, the conclusions of the study make it seem that the problems were all solved. The advantages were mentioned on the video, but what about the procedures and policies to make these advantages feasible?

In 2001, 40 years after the 1961 EMR video was released, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a controversial report called “Crossing the Quality of Chasm”. The IOM not only presented the same issues that were presented on the 1961 EMR video, but clearly stated that “The U.S. health care delivery system does not provide consistent, high quality medical care to all people”.

I think implementation of health information technology systems in healthcare organizations is essential to resolve this issue. In order to make this happen, several actions must take place and here I mention some of them. A robust national health information exchange structure must be build; the preparation of healthcare professionals to

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