Over the years, healthcare professionals have been exploring ways to improve interdisciplinary medical professionals’ collaborations who use data to improve patient medical care. For these professionals to provide effective medical care, they use a variety of health informatics tools in their daily operations, which need standardization as underscored in the HITECH Act. According to the health information technology act, informatics tools’ successful implementation is often hampered during the conversion process from analog media ( Agrawal, 2013) . Therefore, hospitals must define healthcare professionals who are responsible for handling, testing, publishing, and implementing the tool. According to American Medical Informatics Association, informatics tools intersect health professionals, data, and technology to improve patient care quality ( Weaver et al., 2018) . For example, usage of informatics tools such as patient portals and healthcare applications fosters collaborations increasing their productivity and expanding their opportunities to grow professionally. Therefore, medical schools and other healthcare institutions should integrate informatics tools while educating healthcare professionals to reduce medical errors, increase efficiency, provide decision support, and improve patients’ general outcomes.
Since the inception of modern nursing disciplines, medical errors are estimated to affect over 1.5 million patients globally per year ( Wu et al., 2019) . Medical errors such as wrong prescriptions, misdiagnosis, and even wrong drug prescriptions could further complicate their conditions. Educating healthcare professionals on the importance of electronic health records (EHR), which are digital systems that could provide and analyze diagnoses, could be critical. These systems prevent errors such as incorrect recording of patient data and helps integrate technology, medical professionals, and patient data into one system. Education of healthcare professionals on the usage of automated drug dispensing systems decreases the likelihood of mistakes of wrong identification of patients with their medication. Additionally, the integration of informatics tools improved the retrieval of patient’s records. Of all the technologies around healthcare provision, telehealth could be effectively implemented to educate healthcare professionals.
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Telehealth is an informatics tool that could utilize technology to manage healthcare services remotely. With telehealth, doctors and other medical practitioners could help diabetic patients, for example, regulate their blood sugar levels by uploading food logs and reviewing their medication ( Weaver et al., 2018) . While educating healthcare professionals, telehealth informatics tools could be used by using remote monitoring web-based up to provide better care for patients. For example, a primary care doctor could send exam notes or x-ray results to their colleague for review. Additionally, a senior doctor or a supervisor may respond to a nurse using the web-based application or conduct a virtual meeting where they might discuss emerging issues pertaining to patient care. Virtual consultations in conjunction with other healthcare informatics tools such as personal health apps would enable healthcare professionals to provide quality healthcare.
Even though informatics tools are critical to the healthcare sector in reducing errors, expanding access to medical content, and improving overall healthcare quality, the system has not been fully implemented in educating healthcare professionals. According to research conducted by WHO, the main barrier to implementing informatics tools is the lack of funding to develop the programs. Even though implementation of such programs might help educate healthcare providers and improve the overall performance of healthcare, investments in informatics tools are expensive. Lack of investors to fund infrastructure is the main setback to the implementation of the tool. Additionally, the lack of effective legislation to regulate informatics tools hinders growth in the sector. Therefore, medical practitioners, together with other stakeholders, should develop ways of increasing the adoption of informatics tools into the healthcare sector to increase efficiency and improve general patient outcomes.
References
Agrawal, A. (2013). Medication errors: prevention using information technology systems. British journal of clinical pharmacology , 67 (6), 681-686.
Weaver, J., Willy, M., & Avigan, M. (2018). Informatic tools and approaches in postmarketing pharmacovigilance used by FDA. The AAPS journal , 10 (1), 35-41.
Wu, D. T., Chen, A. T., Manning, J. D., Levy-Fix, G., Backonja, U., Borland, D., ... & Gotz, D. (2019). Evaluating visual analytics for health informatics applications: a systematic review from the American Medical Informatics Association Visual Analytics Working Group Task Force on Evaluation. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 26 (4), 314-323.
