Emergency Department Information Systems
The article I found was called "Information Systems Improve Hospitals Emergency Department" by David Raths. The article talks about various ways in which information system has helped to make the emergency room department better by using various information systems and applications of different software used in the hospitals by doctors, nurses and other emergency room staff. The articles specifically mentions ways in which information is used to go from paperless to digital form while encorporating eveything involved with the old system such as the employees, technology and data. The information used in emergency department is known as Emergency Department Information Systems (EDIS).
The usage and development of information systems to be used allows for faster and more reliable service in the emergency department. Time is an essentail quality when it comes to emergency room care. The faster information can be retreived, the faster a patient can be dealth with, therefore saving more lives than ever before. I think that a system that is developed around and along with emergency room employees is one that will prove most beneficial for all involved including patients. Having patient information being available on hand will allow doctors to avoid the trouble of going all over the place looking for information about all his patients he is tending to at a particular time which we know can be a lot. Not only does it allow for textual data to be retreived but it allows doctors to have on hand charts and tests results for particular patients. This does not only save the doctors a vast amount of time, but also saves the hospital on a whole a lot more. The informaiton on patients are stored in database which eliminates the need for a lot of papers to be going around.
It also saves the hospital the risk of having to worry about what would happen to medical records in the case of a fire. Data on patients would be stored away from the hospital. Although this would mean getting all employees trained to used the developed information, it is something that would evidently had to be done in either case because technology is all around us today, and it just not useful one specific entity to be left behind and not benifit from the advantages that technology proves us today.
I believe that the advantages that information systems would provide in the emergency room far outweighs any disadvantages that other would come up with. While the overhead cost of developing the system such as FirstNet or incorporating an information system with the old system such as EDTracker as mentioned in the article is high. The long term saves far overcome this cost in the lives that it saves through time and the money that it saves through having a paperless enviornment. Also with all hospitals moving towards an information system it will allow for medical information to be avaible nationwide which is currently being worked on without compromising patients private data. It will allow for treatments of patients to be better at any hospital that they go to. All in all Emergency Department Information Systems is the way to go for hospitals.
SOURCE:
Raths, D. (2009, March). Information systems improve hospital emergency departments. KM World, 18(3), 12-32
This article is greatly synonymous with my own; they both refer to the use of Health IT improving patient outcomes and costs associated with hospitals. Although this article is "emergency-department" specific, for the most part, the research is the same. What I found interesting in this critique was the mention of records being stored in a database being beneficial in the instance of a fire. I had not considered this benefit when researching the topic. While understanding that data could easily be transferred in house and extracted from outside sources, I had not realized the feasibility of transporting data to other locations, nor the benefit in doing so. Not only does this save a medical corporation money, but it is also an improvement to their risk mitigation plan. This article further justifies how one IT application can impact an entity in more ways than just one.
ReplyDelete