Healthcare Information System Hospitals and other health care organizations have

Question

Healthcare Information System

Hospitals and other health care organizations have a large amount of valuable information about patients, their healthcare treatment history, and their current and past health status. You have been asked to design and build a system that helps to mine this data in several different ways.First, a research team of doctors, nurses, and other researchers need to be able to carry out experiments on new medications and innovative treatments for various diseases and conditions. One issue that they face is identifying a cohort of people who have particular characteristics on which to test these new medication or treatments. For example, they may have a new treatment for diabetes. They may want to have a cohort of patients who have a particular type of diabetes (e.g., type 1 or type 2). Furthermore, they may need this cohort to be in a particular age range, and to be free of coronary heart disease. Thus, these specifications for cohorts can be quite complex. They want an interface that is easy to use. There shall be both a web interface and an iPad interface to the system. Another use of this data mining is to track how doctors are performing for a particular hospital. That is, the hospital may want to know which doctors have patients for which their treatments are being successful. Or an insurance company may want to know which doctors are prescribing the most procedures for their patients. More importantly, they may want to track the number of procedures prescribed correlated with the effectiveness of those treatments. Another use of this data is to give a warning about patients who have had multiple types of treatments with the goal of making sure that various doctors are aware of what other physicians are doing for this patient.Thus, there are three types of ways of mining this data. One is to create cohorts of patients with particular characteristics. A second is explore the performance of a specific physician with respect to qualities like number of procedures prescribed, effectiveness of treatments, cost of treatments prescribed, etc. A third is to track the healthcare of a particular patient to assure that he or she is getting the best possible treatment.Privacy is a concern for this data. In all of these uses, there are HIPAA privacy requirements that require that a patient’s medical data is not disclosed without his/her permission.

Nonfunctional requirements:

A. What is one nonfunctional requirements for the system? State it appropriately.

B. Why is this nonfunctional rather than functional?

Explanation / Answer

Health Informatics is a term describing the acquiring, storing, retrieving and using of healthcare information to foster better collaboration among a patient’s various healthcare providers. Health Informatics plays a critical role in the push toward healthcare reform.

Health informatics is an evolving specialization that links information technology, communications and healthcare to improve the quality and safety of patient care.

Differentiating from Health IT

Though the concept of health IT includes the use of technology in the healthcare field, health informatics is not synonymous with health IT. Instead, informatics is “the science, the how and why, behind health IT,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health informatics applies informatics concepts, theories, and practices to real-life situations to achieve better health outcomes. This includes collecting, storing, analyzing, and presenting data in a digital format.

Working in the Field

The tremendous growth in the health informatics field was spurred in large part by the acceleration of electronic health record (EHR) adoption brought about by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' "meaningful use" incentive program.

As providers move quickly to embrace EHRs, which are designed to store and share information from all providers involved in a patient’s care, health informatics specialists will continue to be in high demand as healthcare facilities implement new systems, upgrade existing databases and work toward achieving the three stages of “meaningful use.”

CareerBuilder.com ranks health informatics as the No. 1 job opportunity in an emerging industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of health information technicians is projected to grow 15 percent through 2024, which is more than double the average growth for all occupations in the U.S.

Job titles in this industry include:

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