Healthcare Informatics a Client Arrives

Healthcare Informatics

A client arrives in the emergency department with shortness of breath and complaining of chest pain. Describe how informatics can help nurses and other health care providers to more efficiently and effectively care for this client.

The use of informatics can provide insights into the patients' previous medical history and the potential treatment plans for their symptoms and guidance on which medications and previous treatment approaches were the most successful. Informatics in emergency room and triage treatment scenarios has proven to significantly increase treatment accuracy and reduce mortality rates over the long-term (Martin, 2007). Informatics then needs to concentrate on integrating the patients' medical history and interactions with those of the potential treatment scenarios and strategies of the healthcare facility (Martin, 2007). The integration of computer-based patient records (CPR) into the broader set of systems comprising emergency support have the potential to provide the insights necessary for the emergency medical technicians and treatment specialists to correctly diagnose shortness of breath and chest pain accurately (Hebda, Czar, 2008). Obviously this could signal cardiac arrest or a heart attack, yet the patients' previous medical condition and history would need to be taken into account to make sure the diagnosis was accurate. In addition to all these aspects of informatics it is also critically important for the healthcare provider to have refined the emergency room series of processes, roles of those healthcare professionals working to serve patients, their skill sets, and the inventory of equipment, drugs, and treatment systems in the emergency room. All of these aspects of the treatment plan must also be taken into account within the informatics systems to ensure treatment plans are achievable (Ostlerlund, 2007). This process-centric approach to managing resources within an informatics system is critically important for making sure the right professionals are available at the right time, with the proper equipment that has been maintained so it can be rapidly deployed in emergencies as mentioned in this question (Hebda, Czar, 2008). All of these factors need to be taken into account in creating a treatment plan that can increase the likelihood of curing the patient and returning them to health.

You are working on a committee that is looking at ways to decrease errors in patient identification that threaten patient safety. You have been asked to consider information technology solutions. What types of applications may be used to ensure correct patient selection?

As a member of a committee concentrating on how to decrease errors in patient identification, I would first take a very process-centric view of the systems, procedures and roles of people involved in capturing and entering patient data into the system. As part of this step of measuring the level of data input quality of patient identification I would also put into place data quality standards and audit standards and procedures (Hebda, Czar, 2008). Periodically I would want to make sure the data was audited to make sure the underlying processes and systems used for capturing it were working correctly. In conjunction with these measures of ensuring patient data is being correctly captured processes for data reliability assessment would be used (Alhaqbani, Josang, Fidge, 2009). While these two areas of capturing patient data accurately, auditing it to make sure the underlying processes are in fact working correctly, and then layering in reliability assessment analyses would serve as the foundation for the types of software applications that would be used for automating patient information capturing. The specific types of applications would be business process management (BPM)-based so that if necessary the underlying processes of patient information capture could be re-engineered over time. The use of BPM and business process re-engineering (BPR) within the context of software applications would also ensure they would continually be able to scale and stay agile to the healthcare providers' needs over time (Hebda, Czar, 2008).