What Can Healthcare Informatics Do?
Healthcare Informatics can provide a range of benefits for hospitals with the required infrastructure to analyze patient data:
Support Clinical Decision Making
Electronic health records are the primary recording medium for patient data in the healthcare setting. When patient data is stored in a secure cloud-based application, it can be manually accessed and updated by a patient’s team of doctors, nurses, and specialists, even if they work in different locations. Some connected medical devices or software applications with healthcare interoperability features may push automatic updates of patient status to the EHR. The result is an easily accessible and up-to-date set of records that can support effective clinical decision making.
Improve Pharmacy, Lab and Home Healthcare
Healthcare Informatics plays a role in making laboratory results more readily accessible to primary care-givers and bridging communications gaps between the doctors who write prescriptions and the pharmacists who fill them. Patients have been able to go home earlier after surgeries thanks to wearable medical devices that monitor the vital signs of the patient and automatically update the EHR, which physicians monitor to ensure the patient is recovering well.
Drive Public Health Research and Initiatives
Research organizations collect large amounts of anonymous patient data and use it in public health research. On the micro-scale, that could mean searching for patterns of infections and illness to detect and address epidemic outbreaks before they increase in severity. On a macro scale, it could mean sourcing millions of X-ray images from across the country and teaching a machine-learning algorithm to read and interpret them.
