HCS/482 Health Care Informatics
University of Phoenix
November 14, 2011
Technology and Decision Making
The quality of patient care, communication between health care staff, and the safety of patients has greatly improved since the onset of technology. Through the improvement of information technology, the ability to collect data and manage the decisions based on the data collected has enhanced in the clinical setting as well as in the business portion. Health care informatics incorporates theories from informational science, computer science, and cognitive science (Englebardt & Nelson, 2002). This information helps to gather and process it in order to make an informed decision. …show more content…
“A system is a set of related interacting parts enclosed in a boundary” (Englebardt & Nelson, 2002, p.5). There are many types of systems which include but are not limited to: computer systems, school systems, health care systems, and people. Systems can be living or nonliving, open or closed. Closed systems do not act with the environment whereas open system have the ability to act with the environment.
Open systems can be used to understand technology and those individuals associated with its use. This type of system takes input from the environment, processes it, and then returns it back to the environment as output, which serves as feedback. This theory can better help the individual understand the way people work with systems in the health care industry and allow for a visualization of the whole …show more content…
“Information technology has the potential to greatly streamline healthcare and greatly reduce the chance of human error. However, there is a growing literature indicating that if systems are not designed adequately they may actually increase the possibility of error in the complex interaction between clinician and machine in healthcare” (Borycki, E., Kushniruk, A., Brender, J., 2010, p. 714). The term information has more than one meaning and the term information theory refers to multiple theories. The two common theoretical theories of information theories are: Shannon and Weaver’s information-communication model and Blum’s model (Englebardt & Nelson, 2002, p.