Introduction And Role Of Health Information System Essay

480 CA1
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480 CA1
The healthcare sector is one of the most critical sectors in an economy. Healthcare determines people's wellbeing and, therefore, their ability to study, work, and live out their days healthy. A country without a well-functioning healthcare sector suffers significantly due to the inability to handle ailing citizens and worse situations such as disease outbreaks. In the United States (U.S.), the healthcare information system (HIS) plays a significant role in strengthening its healthcare sector (Roberts et al., 2016). Through HIS, healthcare providers can share medical records and treatment procedures. Simultaneously, patients can access their medical records to keep track of their health (Kruse et al., 2016). Contemporary literature shows that HIS is essential to the healthcare sector. This paper explores the topic of HIS with a particular focus on its implementation in the U.S.
One of the challenges in the American healthcare sector is cybersecurity. Data breaches and ransomware are among the common cybersecurity issues experienced by the healthcare industry (Mariani & Mohammed, 2015). In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic showed how vulnerable patient information could be. Also, there are digital health initiatives such as telehealth, which have increased data breaches. Given that several healthcare functions will shift to online this year, they must be protected from threats (Mariani & Mohammed, 2015). HIS initiatives can be used to solve the problem of cybersecurity by putting in place better security measures. However, for this to be achieved, the health sector needs to collaborate with the ICT sector to develop better security mechanisms.
Another challenge that is driving the implementation of HIS is payment processing. Direct patient payments contribute the largest percentage of revenue in medical practice (Bohmer & Knoop, 2007). Therefore, healthcare providers need to adhere to patient payment preferences if payments are to be submitted on time (Bohmer & Knoop, 2007). HIS initiatives can address this issue by providing patients with several payment options. More payment options mean that patients can transact easily and at any time.
The healthcare sector generates numerous amounts of data, which presents another challenge. The data is scattered across multiple parties, including healthcare providers, patients, and payers (Kruse et al., 2016). The result is a lack of a single source of truth that can be used to optimize a patient's experience. Therefore, HIS becomes crucial in the management of healthcare data (Kruse et al., 2016). HIS initiatives can solve increased data issues by concentrating data on one database and providing a well-laid out structure to disseminate patient information.
In addition to supporting healthcare services delivery, healthcare organizations can use HIS data to provide data on disease outbreaks. In 2020, the coronavirus outbreak caused great panic among citizens, the government, and healthcare providers. For some time, providers were unaware of the seriousness of the virus. Without HIS data, the coronavirus situation in the country would have bee...