public health

Health Informatics Department HCI 314

Jackson, K. M. (2009). ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS AND PUBLIC HEALTH INFORMATICS. 19-20.

1

The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate your understanding of the concepts learned in

this course.

 Submission Instructions:

Complete and submit this assignment according to your professor’s instructions.

 Grading Criteria

Grading will be based on the depth and accuracy of your answer: 0–12 points the following

rubric will be used to assess this assignment. Please familiarize yourself with it and do not

hesitate to refer back to it before, during, and after composing your answer.

 Grading criteria:

 A) Quality of the Content

 Knowledge

 3= Good

 2= Above average

 1= Below average

 0= Not Related to the question/not within the assignment scope

 Depth of Analysis

 4= Good

 3= Above average

 2= Below average

 1= Weak/poor

 0= Not Related to the question/not within the assignment scope

 B)

 STYLE: Provided the required writing style (Essay, Report etc).

 1= The Right style

 0= Not the right style

 Organization

 1= The layout is organize, the file mane include the student name

and Student ID (Metadata).

 0= Not organized with no metadata.

 Referencing

 1= Used the correct style

 0= the wrong style

 Spelling/grammar

 2= Minimal to no spelling/grammar mistakes

Health Informatics Department HCI 314

Jackson, K. M. (2009). ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS AND PUBLIC HEALTH INFORMATICS. 19-20.

2

 1= Few to moderate spelling/grammar mistakes

 0= Noticeable frequent spelling/grammar mistakes

 Action Items:

 Review below case

 Answer the questions that follow the case study in a Word document.

Case study:

Monday morning: The week gets off to an interesting start as patient Mark Bayne reports to the

clinic. Mr. Bayne is a contact lens wearer who comes in with a red eye. His right eye had been

bothering him for a week, and it was slowly getting worse. When examined, the right eye

exhibited perilimbal injection of the bulbar conjunctiva and a corneal defect. The corneal defect

was a dense anterior stromal corneal infiltrate with diffuse borders overlying a subtle focal area

of corneal thinning 2mm eccentric to the visual axis. Using the electronic health record to look

up Mr. Bayne’s previous eye notes you determined that his right eye was clear at his last

examination two months ago.

Your electronic health record’s Infobutton application suggested several relevant topic

information links in response to the information you input into the medical encounter. Selecting

the infobutton corresponding to fungal keratitis (one of your primary rule outs), you are

reminded that using a simple KOH +CFW smear preparation for the light microscope as well as

culturing in Sabouraud 2% glucose-agar (without cyclohexamide) would yield the best chance of

detecting fungal keratitis. Armed with this information you take the correct corneal specimens

prior to treating the patient, as medication might contaminate your results. As you write the

patient’s orders in your EHR a reminder pops up indicating that this patient is due for a periodic

visual field examination in one month to monitor for glaucoma. You mention this to Mr. Bayne

and prior to leaving he sets up that appointment hopeful that the current malady will have

resolved by then. Having taken your specimen and recorded your results you send the patient off

to the corneal specialist confident that your notes will be available to her. The next day Mr.

Bayne is seen by the corneal specialist, and the results from the laboratory of your initial

scraping indicate that with light microscopy hyphae were detected. Although the results of this

testing were sent to you they are available to the corneal specialist using a compatible medical

record and the regional health information exchange (RHIO). As a result the specialist is able to

move forward with the most up to date information for the patient improving patient care.

Health Informatics Department HCI 314

Jackson, K. M. (2009). ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS AND PUBLIC HEALTH INFORMATICS. 19-20.

3

Your lab order for Mr. Bayne and EHR notes are available through the RHIO to those entities

with permission to view them. Governmental public health agencies monitor lab testing and

other early indicators of disease outbreak. Public health surveillance picked up on your lab order.

Tuned to detect increases in particular lab tests the software noted there has been an increase in

your state of the use of corneal cultures utilizing fungal specific Sabouraud's medium this past

week, (normal incidence of 3 to 4 per week up to 10 this week). This increase in the number of

these cultures alerts public health officials to the possible increase in fungal infections of the

cornea. When the state agency matches the lab orders with the patients’ address information

obtained from their providers’ EHR they are able to feed this information into a Geographic

Information System which pinpoints the location of the patients on a map such as seen in figure

2. In this case, the map makes it obvious that the problem is isolated to the area surrounding

Yonkers, New York. An alert is then sent out to eye doctors, primary care doctors and laboratory

personnel in this area informing them of the situation and asking for them to report episodes of

suspected fungal keratitis. As a result of this request an outbreak is detected and its source is

located resulting in the recall of an isolated lot number of a particular contact lens solution.

Discussion question:

1- Health information exchange is necessary to allow data to flow beyond the bounds

of the provider's office; From above case select a public health problem that

requires data/information to be transfer from health information systems to the

public health system and describe how this can impact public health?

2- From above case select an information system that is serving public health and

describe the advantage and disadvantage of using this system in public health?

3- Explain the importance of standards in public health informatics?