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Patient portals, electronic medical records, and personal monitoring devices are three of the most revolutionary technologies in the healthcare sector. Each of these technologies presents patients with the potential to empower themselves, taking control of their own healthcare outcomes, and taking part in their overall healthcare goals. These technologies also streamline healthcare administration and minimize medication and billing errors. However, each of these technologies is also constrained by a range of issues related to accessibility, with potent socioeconomic class disparities evident. Security and standardization of healthcare technologies are also proving problematic. Patient portals, electronic medical records, and personal monitoring devices are all technologies that have the potential to radically improve the quality of healthcare and patient outcomes, as well as improve overall patient experiences. Because of their abundant benefits, these technologies need to be embraced and promoted through effective public health policies. Otherwise, disparities will continue to threaten to exacerbate the already significant social determinants of health.Patient Portals
Online portals are rapidly becoming the main point of contact and communication between patients and the healthcare system. Patient portals allow patients to access their own medical history and medication records, learn more about their conditions and information related to prevention and self care, and also manage their billing. The technology is “becoming more widely used...
1117). Enrollment in patient portals has been shown to be around 70% (Goel, Brown, Williams, et al., 2011). Therefore, patient portals can and should penetrate the healthcare system to a greater extent than they already are.
Yet patient portals have yet to be standardized, and reveal the shocking disparities with regards to demographics like age and ethnicity. All nonwhite minorities, and older patients, are the least likely to be enrolled in the patient portals (Goel, Brown, Williams, et al., 2011). Recent research on patient portal usage shows that those “most at risk” for common diseases like diabetes “may fall further behind” in terms of healthcare outcomes due to the disparities in use (Sarkar, Karter, Liu, et al, 2011). Disparities in patient portal use is also associated with overall disparities in health literacy, with patients who already have strong health literacy being more likely to use the portals versus patients with weak health literacy (Sarkar, Karter, Liu, et al., 2010). These findings reveal strong implications for how healthcare organizations and perhaps more importantly, health policymakers, can capitalize on technology to reduce social disparities in health.
Electronic Medical Records
Electronic medical records offer tremendous potential for reducing overall medical errors, particularly medication errors. Used judiciously throughout the healthcare system, electronic…
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
Health Care Informatics Expert Systems Expert systems are always computer applications that tend to combine computer equipment, special information and software so that they imitate reasoning and advice of expert human. Being a part of artificial intelligence they offer discipline-specific advice as well as explanation to their users. Artificial intelligence covers a broad field of several aspects of computer generated thought, on the other hand, expert systems focuses narrowly. The area where
Healthcare Informatics & Technology 1. What were the goals of the Cure4Kids program in 2003? How have they evolved? Cure4Kids was developed with the overall intention of treating and hence improving the wellbeing of children suffering from pediatric cancer and AIDA (Quintana, Nambayan, Ribeiro, Bowers, Shuler and O’Brein, 2003). Towards this end, in addition to education, the other stated objective of Cure4Kids was the provision of “tools for communications and collaborations among
Triple Constraints Health care informatics and how that field interacts and is affected by triple constraints is the subject of this brief report. Further complicating this paradigm is thre passage and enforcement of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Specifically, the meaningful use objectives that are mandated by that act have simply added more hoops for informatics project personnel to jump through. While the HITECH act
Al., 2012). The existing reporting systems lack the level of usability inherent in social media applications as well. Social media applications have created and continue to fuel the expectation of usability that is the new standard for tablet-based applications and systems (Boicey, 2013). The proposed new analytics application will also enable the entire healthcare provider staff to have greater agility and flexibility in defining process workflows and quickly redefining dashboards and key
Healthcare Informatics: Tele-health technologies 1) Tele-health technologies represent a sub-division of healthcare information technology which aid in delivering long-distance health education, public health, clinical care, health administration and relevant information. They encompass hardware as well as software and enhance general system efficacy through the maximization of individual practitioner productivity and elimination of geographical care obstacles. Perhaps the most ideal use of tele-health technology is real-time interactions, where patients and practitioners located