OVERVIEW OF
HEALTH INFORMATICS
HIS
Lesson 4: Health Informatics
TOPIC OUTLINE
1. Health Information Technology
2. Healthcare Software Systems
3. Health Information Ecosystem
4. Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Technology
5. Health Information System in the Philippines
HIS
HIS
Health Information Technology
• Rouse (2016) defines Health Information Technology
(HIT) as “the area of IT involving the design,
development, creation, use, and maintenance of
information systems for the healthcare industry.
Automated and interoperable healthcare information
systems are expected to:
1. improve medical care
2. lower costs
3. increase efficiency
4. reduce error
5. improve patient satisfaction
HIS
Healthcare Software Systems
• The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is the central component
of the health IT infrastructure.
An EHR or electronic medical record is a person's official, digital
health record and is shared among multiple healthcare providers
and agencies.
Other key elements of the health IT infrastructure:
(a) personal health record (PHR), which is a person's self-
maintained health record, and the health information
exchange (HIE),
(b) health data clearinghouse or a group of healthcare
organizations that enter into an interoperability pact and agree
to share data between their various health IT systems.
HIS
Healthcare Software Systems
1. Picture archiving and communication systems
(PACS)
2. Vendor neutral archives (VNAs)
• store and manage patients' medical images. In
the past, radiology departments have been the
primary repositories of medical images, but
PACS and VNAs are integrating radiology into
the main hospital workflow, and other
specialties such as cardiology and neurology
have also become large-scale producers of
clinical images. HIS
Healthcare Software Systems
HIS
Healthcare Software Systems
HIS
Health Information Ecosystem
Health Interoperability Ecosystem
- Composed of individuals, systems and
processes that want to share, exchange, and
access all forms of health information, including
discrete, narrative and multimedia.
• Each potential stakeholder is involved in the
creation, exchange and use of health information
and/or data.
• provides an information infrastructure that uses
technical standards, policies and protocols to
enable seamless and secure capture, discovery,
exchange and utilization of health information.
HIS
Health Informatics in the Cloud
• 83% of healthcare organizations are making
use of cloud-based applications, and it is
changing the landscape of the healthcare
system and health informatics.
• “Cloud computing” is a method for delivering
IT services in which resources are retrieved
from the Internet through web-based tools
and applications.
HIS
Health Informatics in the Cloud
HIS
Advantage 1: Integrated and Efficient
Patient Care
• Cloud technology offers a single access point
for patient information, and this allows
multiple doctors to review lab results or notes
on patients.
• Physicians can spend more time deciding and
performing patient treatment instead of
waiting for information he needs coming from
different departments.
HIS
Disadvantage 1: Potential Risks to
Personal Information
• The information contained within medical
records may be subjected to theft or other
violations of privacy and confidentiality.
Fortunately, safeguards may be put in place in
order to minimize such threats, such as
encryption, proper data disposal, and other
security features.
HIS
Advantage 2: Better Management of
Data
• The accumulation of electronic health records
will allow more meaningful data mining that
can better assess the health of the general
public.
• More data can mean more opportunities to
identify trends in diseases and crises.
HIS
Disadvantage 2: Cloud Set-up Seems
Cumbersome
• The transition from a traditional to an
automated system might be difficult to some
members of healthcare organizations,
particularly for smaller or older practices that
may not be familiar with cloud technology.
HIS
Health Informatics in the Philippines
• Health informatics had been loosely practiced in the
Philippines as early as the 1980s.
• Practitioners who had access to IBM compatible
machines were already using word processors to store
patient information by then. Since then, significant
milestones in health informatics have also occurred
over the years, one of which is the Community Health
Information Tracking System (CHITS), a Linux, Apache,
MySQL, PHP-based system released under the general
public license (GPL).
• CHITS was named finalist at the Stockholm Challenge
2006 and one of top three e-government projects in
the Philippines by the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation Digital Opportunity Center.
HIS
Health Informatics in the Philippines
• CHITS is an electronic medical record (EMR)
developed through the collaboration of the
Information and Communication Technology
community and health workers, primarily designed for
use in Philippine health centers in disadvantaged
areas.
• It is currently utilized in 111 government health
facilities. What used to be manually done before,
taking up 4 to 5 minutes, can now be executed within a
couple of seconds. The implementation of CHITS has
indeed resulted to heightened efficiency among health
workers, since more time can be spent on providing
patient care (Department of Science and Technology,
2012).
HIS
Health Informatics in the Philippines
HIS
Health Informatics in the Philippines
• Despite the developments in health informatics in
the Philippines, the nation still suffers from
various issues that hamper its progress:
(1) lack of human resource interest in the field.
(2) benefits of information technology do not
seem apparent to many decision-makers in the
healthcare sector.
(3) large initial expenditure for a health
information system remains another barrier to the
integration of IT in Philippine healthcare.
HIS