Reply to each students discussion post 1-2 paragraphs

REPLY TO EACH STUDENT’S POST WITH A MINIMUM OF 1-2 PARAGRAPHS.

Week One: Discussion One

Courtney Sheppard

I think the most significant invention in the evolution of health information technology was the implementation of medical information systems into practice. These systems largely came in the 1970s, with the first being Technicon in 1971. Another system that was introduced in the 1970s was the clinical information system used in VA hospitals, which was created by Science Applications International Corporation (Balgrosky, 2020).  I believe these systems were the most significant, because they were the first systems that were comprehensive, and did not just serve for billing systems. They were the first health information technology to deal with health information.

When Technicon and the VA systems were first created, they were not linked to the internet as many systems are today. While the adoption of using the internet in the ability to share data between clinicians, it also can pose a safety threat. When the internet was starting to become more integrated with healthcare systems in the 1990s, the United States government enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to mitigate some of these threats. In current times, we are working towards implementing EHR systems among physicians and practices to protect patient health (Balgrosky, 2020). In times such as the COVID pandemic, this is especially important. Patients may not want to be tested multiple times in order to receive COVID treatment, so with EHR systems in place, physicians would quickly be able to see their previous test and avoid retesting. This would give physicians and patients the peace of mind that their health is being treated to the best of the ability of all the physicians they see, even if they see multiple.

References

Balgrosky, J.A. (2020). Understanding Health Information Systems for the Health Professions (20rd edition). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Week 1 discussion 1

 

Minghao Ji

        The evolution of HIS has taken an interesting turn since its early development. Improving patient-care was the primary motivation when HIS systems were first developed by government entities and private practices. For example, the VistA developed for VA system was “clinically oriented”, “open source”, and “end-users collaborated”; unfortunately, this system cannot stand market challenge for political reasons, and is on its way to be replaced by for-profit commercial systems (Bolgrosky, 2020, p.29-30).

        The commercial vendors who develop HIS primarily have the interest of their shareholders in mind (Bolgrosky, 2020, p.8). Although patient-centering and for-profit are not mutually exclusive, and the vendors may have incentive to develop user-friendly features in order to promote the sales. Profit-driven systems often have some conflicting interests with patient-care. I.e., they have tendencies to develop proprietary software to “strategically withhold opportunity and flexibility for healthcare organizations” to conveniently collaborate with each others (p. 10). It is especially unfortunate when healthcare institutions are suffering financial hardships and even bankruptcy while trying to implement expensive HIS systems (p. 15).

        As health IT continues to take more important role in healthcare, collaboration between different components of HIS will be essential for the future of healthcare system. Entities such, as Mayo Clinic, are using big data and machine learning to create new knowledge to promote health, which requires enormous amount of data aggregation and processing. Even for individual patient care safety, healthcare organizations are at disadvantage when they work as "separate 'silos'" without being able to access a patient's complete information (IOM, 2001). We need to re-evaluate this profit-driven model to study its advantages and disadvantages on its impact on the health information system.

Reference:

Balgrosky, J. (2020). Understanding Health Information Systems for the Health Professions. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Mayo Clinic and Google Cloud announcement. (2019) Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um_0pOIm-PI&t=17s .

Institute of Medicine. (2001). Shaping the Future for Health, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.