Healthcare Information Technology: Effects on Cost Access and Quality

It is not unreasonable for a patient to expect particular services from their healthcare providers. What services should be considered reasonable and which fall under the context of unreasonable? Should the specialist, your family physician referred you to, have access to your past medical history? What happens when you are traveling and have to make a trip to the emergency room, will your physician at home get all the information from that visit or will the ER physician have access to your medical history? Medical information recorded in paper format makes these tasks very difficult, if not impossible. "Fortunately, there is a growing movement to change that, using electronic information technology[3]." The use of this type of technology allows for "high-quality, safe, well-coordinated, and efficient care[4]." Society today is ever changing, we change jobs, location of residence, and doctors frequently. Many of our doctors and hospitals remain stuck in the medical stone age. While people speak of a medical "system," American medicine is in fact very unsystematic: it lacks standards, measures, and the ability to exchange information that constitute a true system. The medical industry has taken to every kind of clinical technology; from digital thermometers to CT scanners. However, the adoption of information technology in the medical industry lags behind the rest of our economy. Health informatics is best described as the point where information science, medicine, and healthcare all meet. It encompasses the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and the use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics incorporates tools such as: computers (hardware and software), clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information/communication systems. Healthcare informatics is comprised of several areas: clinical, nursing, imaging, consumer health, public health, dental, clinical research, and

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