Role of ICT in Improving Patient Care - Essay Example

 Role of ICT in Improving Patient Care (Student’s Name) (Institutional Affiliation) Introduction Patient health care is critically important for modern day hospitals and stakeholders alike. Every hospital desires to achieve efficient, affordable, accessible and high quality health care when delivering services to patients. In order to achieve such goals in hospitals, nurses have to adopt the use of health information technology to facilitate and offer room improved patient outcomes. The World Health Organization highlights the primary objective for health information systems as; the need to collect, analyze and package date and impart the outcomes to others to aid in policy making. In one hand, this implies enhancing nurses access to lab results and diminishing hindrances between perceptions made by various medicinal services suppliers. On the other hand, policy making can be expanded through the execution of a healing center wide clinical choice emotionally supportive network that recovers packs of information and educates the fitting people at the proper time. A good example of such system is Electronic Health Records The Role of Electronic Health Records in Improving Patient Care Ahima (2011) defines an Electronic Health Record (EHR) as a modern version of patient’s medical history, that is updated and maintained by clinicians over a given period of time. Liang (2010) further acknowledges that the contents of EHR are a lot and may encompass all important records on the administration and clinical data that are key to patient’s welfare. Such may include; patient’s progress notes, demographics, ailments, medications, laboratory data, medical history, radiology reports as well as immunization records. All these tons of information show why it is important for nurses to have a modern and integrated system that automates access to information. Some of the basic benefits of EHR include streamlining clinical workflow, quality management and many more as discussed in this paper. Electronic Health Records are without doubt the best information systems that promise an advancement towards provision healthcare that tightens the now greasy relationship between patients and clinicians. I believe the information that the information captured in EHR will empower nurses to provide quality health care services and help patients make better and informed choices. According to Institute of Medicine (2012) EHR can help nurses to improve patient care by; ensuring accurate and clear records are fed in to the systems, enhancing accessibility of health information, reducing delays in treatment, and reducing duplication of tests. Research by WHO shows that in most healthcare organizations, nurses make up the largest majority of people who use technology to promote social care (Liang, 2010). However, before the advancement in health information management, nurses were overly pessimistic about the impact of electronic documentation and information systems on patient care. Most nurses in fact believed that installation of such systems would interrupt their schedule and workflow (Institute of Medicine, 2012). Nonetheless, medical attendants have turned out to be more acclimated to innovation, which is beneficial since their acknowledgment of it is basic to effective framework execution. Nurses are consequently well informed in all parts of data innovation while keeping up predominant levels of patient care. For most nurses, implementation of EHR has helped to decrease the backlog caused by too much workload. Furthermore, well-designed Electronic documentation systems have flow sheets that aid nurses to assemble correct and complete information about the needs of patients and likewise correct information on patients. An all-around planned data framework can encourage and give a simpler and quicker data stream that is required for proficient documentation. The role that nurses play towards ensuring patient's safety is guaranteed during treatment cannot be underestimated. This is because the nature of the nursing condition and electronic documentation impacts patients. The evolution in EHR has seen advancement in communication between nurses and patients. Additionally, EHRs can improve public health outcomes. EHRs can also help nurse assess large number of patients at a time through the help of computerized data. For example, in cases where clinicians have electronic health information about the whole populace of patients they serve can look all the more definitively at the requirements of patients who: are qualified for particular preventive measures, suffer from a specific health problems or are on particular drugs. Similarly, Electronic Health Records help nurses identify, provide and work with patients to oversee particular hazard variables or mixes of hazard components to enhance persistent results (Ahima, 2011). For instance, nurses may wish to recognize: the number of suffering from hypertension have it controlled or the number of patients with diabetes have their glucose estimations in the objective range and have had proper screening tests. The examples above clearly show how implementation of Electronic Health Records system provide quality improvement in provision of health care. Nevertheless, installation of such technologically advanced systems does not come without challenges for nurses. Some of the challenges include; data security, data quality and standards, complexity, human acceptance of IT (Duffy, 2013). Yet in light of these limitations, some critics purport that no other industry puts as meager in IT as the social insurance industry. Most health organization and hospitals still depend on old fashioned paper records sorted out by visual shading codes, letter set and number. First, ensuring that the quality of data is of highest standards offers a great challenge for nurses. Quality change information must be solid and legitimate so as to gauge execution and change inside a human services framework or to make correlations with different associations (Duffy, 2013). Nurse believe that the electronic exchange of data between departments and organizations has been hampered by the moderate advancement of standard clinical guide, lines and classification Another challenge for nurses, as Ahima (2011) asserts, is protecting recorded data and information. Guaranteeing the security of patient and hospital information is a noteworthy necessity of human services data organizing techniques. The accessibility of simple and quick electronic transmission of patient data to different associations at various areas expands the danger of disregarding privacy. At some point, due to comfort and effectiveness, nurses may forget to consider these security concerns. Conclusion For decades now, the health sector has lagged behind in implementing IT to improve services that promise quality and efficiency. Given the multifaceted nature of health care delivery, it is unavoidable that IT will assume a perpetually expanding part in enhancing social insurance quality. To gain noteworthy ground, a noteworthy re-designing of the human services conveyance framework is required, which requires changes in specialized, sociological, social, instructive, money related, and other vital elements. This therefore puts nurses at the helm of technological implementation in hospital facilities. References Ahima. (2011) "HIM Functions in Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety" Journal of AHIMA 82, no.8 (): 42-45. Institute of Medicine (U.S.). (2012). Health IT and patient safety: Building safer systems for better care. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Liang, L. L. (2010). Connected for health: Transforming care delivery at Kaiser Permanente. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Duffy, J. R., & Duffy, J. R. (2013). Quality caring in nursing and health systems: Implications for clinicians, educators, and leaders. New York, NY: Springer Pub. Read More