1. How do clinical information management and decision support systems impact healthcare and nursing processes?
Clinical information management systems, together with clinical decision support systems, are quite lucrative in enhancing the quality of healthcare, promoting patient safety, improving the overall efficiency of healthcare providers and cost-saving benefits, as suggested by Nelson and Staggers (2018). The information management and decision support systems create a technical infrastructure required by healthcare institutions to share and transfer complete health data digitally. According to Al-Jaghbeer et al. (2018), clinical information management systems provide a secure database for storage of confidential patient records. Such systems help healthcare organisations to comply with ethical standards and legal principles, which relate to health information privacy and security. Therefore, health information systems have positively impacted the role of healthcare and also facilitated the effective delivery of patient services by registered nurses within healthcare systems.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Clinical health information management systems also help in medical coding; thus, making the work of nurses relatively less cumbersome, as suggested by Al-Jaghbeer et al. (2018). These systems assign correct medical codes required before reimbursement by Medicaid and Medicare, among other healthcare services payers. The clinical information management system is a technical infrastructure which ensures that all relevant health data include correct diagnoses and are in line with ordered procedure. These systems have also facilitated the timely retrieval of patients’ records ( Coiera, 2015) . Traditionally, most patient records were stored in files. Extraction of a patient’s records from a healthcare institution’s filing system was relatively difficult. However, provisions of infrastructure for health informatics such as the clinical information management systems have greatly enhanced medical record-keeping and retrieval. Therefore, healthcare organisations should strive to adopt effective strategies meant to implement and improve clinical health information management systems in a bid to enhance effective service delivery and promote health among patients.
It is quite evident that clinical decision systems (CSDs) and clinical information management have played a pivotal in improving the quality of patient care and promoting patient outcomes within healthcare systems. According to Coiera (2015), CDS provides patients, healthcare providers, and other staff members with relevant person-specific knowledge, which promotes health and enhances healthcare services rendered to out-patients and hospitalised patients. Advanced Practice Nurses (APNs) can utilise clinical decision support system tools to enhance effective and timely decision-making within the nursing workflow, as suggested by Aanestad et al. (2018). Among the provisions of the clinical decision support system include automated reminders and programmed alerts to patients and clinicians, patient-centred data reports, template documentation, and diagnostic support tools. Diagnostic tools of the CDS systems help nurses and clinicians to avoid the detrimental effects of misdiagnosis within healthcare systems.
Additionally, clinical decision support systems have helped nurses among other healthcare practitioners to manage clinical details and complexity, as suggested by Aanestad et al. (2018). With such systems, nurses can easily keep track of orders, chemotherapy protocols and referrals. Moreover, the CDS system has also helped to reduce the overall cost for medical services rending healthcare services affordable to the general public (Aanestad et al., 2018). Clinical decision support systems not only monitor therapeutic orders but also help to nurses and clinicians to prevent duplication and unnecessary. The most prominent contribution of the clinical decision support system is its role in supporting proper clinical diagnoses and formulating effective treatment plans for patients seeking medical care. When used together with evidence-based practices, clinical information management, and decision support systems reduce the incidence rate of medical errors resulting from misdiagnosis or prescription errors (Coiera, 2015). Therefore, these systems have helped to reduce the number of legal lawsuits against healthcare providers resulting from medical negligence. The lucrative effects of clinical information management and clinical decision support systems cannot be underestimated based on the fact that these systems have significantly improved the quality of healthcare services, promoted patient safety within healthcare institutions, enhanced the security of patient medical records, and also facilitated accurate disease diagnosis.
References
Aanestad, M., Monteir, E., Kimaro, H. C., Macombe, E., Macueve, G., Mukama, F., ... & Lungo, J. (2018). Strategies for development and integration of health information systems: coping with historicity and heterogeneity.
Al-Jaghbeer, M., Dealmeida, D., Bilderback, A., Ambrosino, R., & Kellum, J. A. (2018). Clinical decision support for in-hospital AKI. Journal of the American Society of Nephrology , 29 (2), 654-660.
Coiera, E. (2015). Guide to health informatics . CRC press.
Nelson, R. & Staggers, N. (2018). Health Informatics: An Interprofessional Approach, 2 nd Ed. ISBN: 978-0-323-40231-6
