Use and Role of Health Care Information Systems

Use and Role of Health Care Information Systems
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Use and Role of Health Care Information Systems
Introduction
Since publishing the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, the health care system has recorded an accelerated application of health information systems (HIS) with varying evidence thresholds concerning the impact of healthcare information systems on patient outcomes. HIS constitutes technologies tools employed to process information and fundamentally involves use of computer software and hardware to facilitate the storing, recovery, distribution, as well as utilization of medical care knowledge, information, and data for decision-making and information sharing ends. It allows hospitals to gather, store, control, appraise and improve client data and other important medication histories to enhance care outcomes. Hospitals are leveraging the power of healthcare information technology to enhance patient outcomes and better engage patients to play a central role in the health care processes. This report evaluates the use and role of health care information systems in improving patient care and subsequent outcomes.
How Health Care Information Systems Improve Patient Outcomes
Expert opinion indicates that HIS has the potential to enhance patient care (Carroll, 2015). For example, decision support can immensely improve the number of pediatricians aware of the current practice recommendations and clinical practice plans. This indicates that HIS implementation enhances patient care, including improving compliance to medication and ensuring the appropriate referrals are made for patients’ specialty care and treatment. Without health information technology, patient care improvement benefits are increasingly challenging to realize (Carroll, 2015). That said, it can be inferred that implementing health information technologies is likely to enhance patient care outcomes in different dimensions. HIS is a technological innovation that enhances patient safety by employing medication alerts, automating tasks, enhancing consultation and diagnostic reports, allowing effective communication between the provider and the patient, improving the quality of clinical decisions, intercepting possible mistakes, lowering practice variations, and managing human resources shortage and availing patient medical history data on time (Astier et al., 2020). In this way, HIS and its related tools can potentially lower or prevent the prevalence of preventable adverse events (AEs) in different healthcare disciplines, thus enhancing patient health outcomes.
HIS improve patient outcomes by facilitating the implementation of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the healthcare settings. EBM entails the explicit, conscientious, and judicious application of best practice evidence in decision-making concerning an individual patient’s care. In this context, EBM enables healthcare providers to enhance care quality and outcomes by basing their treatment modalities on diverse knowledge about the effectiveness of different interventions (Fichman et al., 2011; Kruse & Beane, 2018). Medical providers can use the HIS to conduct directed searches, suc...