Information technology has impacted health care delivery in many ways. It has immensely helped in ensuring the quality of life and improving human health and life. Through technology and informatics,

Information technology has impacted health care delivery in many ways. It has immensely helped in ensuring the quality of life and improving human health and life. Through technology and informatics, the world has embraced a culture of reducing errors to the barest minimum. Technology has consistently been involved in curbing and decreasing medical errors that affect human lives. Many people have died in hospitals both in the past and present mostly through human error. Some of the errors may be through fatigue, lack of the availability of nurses to double check medications and many others.

Through research and the implementation of technology and data analysis, systems such as pyxis medication dispensing system, meditech, mobilab and many others has evolve. These systems use technology and data to curb and limit the everyday errors that can occur through human errors. These systems allow for the work of health care workers to be at ease with limited errors. It also helps in providing efficient, safe and trusted health healthcare delivery to the sick.

With all these technology at our disposal in my hospital, we still lack a vital tool that affect our health care system. This is an electronic patient health information system. Often times patients complain to me and many of my colleagues that they are unable to acquire their health records from the hospital after discharge. Many requests that they will be able to acquire all the information and services they received while in our care. We mostly print out discharge paper for them which mainly include an education on their currently medical condition for admission and the medication they received. These information are mostly very basic and do not entail a lot. When these patients go through the administration to obtain their health information, they are thrown out to other third-party organization. From one patient’s information that I received; it takes up to about 14 days to get their medical record. In a book by Mary Wakefield (2008), patients should be the source of control over their health and information. Patient should be given the maximum opportunity to involve themselves with every information pertaining to their health.

In my next post, I will be discussion some of the ways I have analyzed to help resolve this issue through assess, collection and implementation of data.

Reference:

About Us. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.centerforpatientsafety.org/about-us/

Nagle, L., Sermeus, W., & Junger, A. (2017). Evolving role of the nursing informatics specialist.

In J. Murphy, W. Goossen, & P. Weber (Eds.), Forecasting Competencies for Nurses in the Future of Connected Health (212–221). Clifton, VA: IMIA and IOS Press. Retrieved from https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_4A0FEA56B8CB.P001/REF

Wakefield, M. K. (2008). The Quality Chasm series: Implications for nursing. In R. G. Hughes (Ed.), Patient safety and quality: An evidence-based handbook for nurses (Vol. 1, pp. 47–66). Rockville, MD: U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.