About us
September 4, 2013 the Health IT Policy Committee (HITPC) accepted and approved recommendations from the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) working group for a risk-based regulatory framework for health information technology.
Benefits of health information technology
While some critics say EHRs have led to clinicians spending more time entering data than conversing with patients and produced cumbersome federal regulations, there is broad consensus on the benefits of health IT. These advantages include:
Health IT (health information technology) is the area of IT involving the design, development, creation, use and maintenance of information systems for the healthcare industry.
Health Information Systems are digital systems with open data that comes from different sources and that is ethically used, through effective ICT tools, to generate strategic information for the benefit of public health.
Health information technology (HIT) is health technology, particularly information technology, applied to health and health care. It supports health information management across computerized systems and the secure exchange of health information between consumers, providers, payers, and quality monitors. Based on a 2008 report on a small series of studies conducted at four sites that provide ambulatory care – three U.S. medical centers and one in the Netherlands, the use of electronic health records (EHRs) was viewed as the most promising tool for improving the overall quality, safety and efficiency of the health delivery system.
Risk-based regulatory framework for health IT.
September 4, 2013 the Health IT Policy Committee (HITPC) accepted and approved recommendations from the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) working group for a risk-based regulatory framework for health information technology. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) kicked off the FDASIA workgroup of the HITPC to provide stakeholder input into a report on a risk-based regulatory framework that promotes safety and innovation and reduces regulatory duplication, consistent with section 618 of FDASIA. This provision permitted the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to form a workgroup in order to obtain broad stakeholder input from across the health care, IT, patients and innovation spectrum. The FDA, ONC, and FCC actively participated in these discussions with stakeholders from across the health care, IT, patients and innovation spectrum.
HIMSS Good Informatics Practices-GIP is aligned with FDA risk-based regulatory framework for health information technology. GIP development began in 2004 developing risk-based IT technical guidance. Today the GIP peer-review and published modules are widely used as a tool for educating Health IT professionals.
Interoperable HIT will improve individual patient care, but it will also bring many public health benefits including:
- early detection of infectious disease outbreaks around the country;
- improved tracking of chronic disease management;
- evaluation of health care based on value enabled by the collection of de-identified price and quality information that can be compared
According to an article published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics, health information sharing between patients and providers helps to improve diagnosis, promotes self care, and patients also know more information about their health. The use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is still scarce now but is increasing in Canada, American and British primary care. Healthcare information in EMRs are important sources for clinical, research, and policy questions. Health information privacy (HIP) and security has been a big concern for patients and providers. Studies in Europe evaluating electronic health information poses a threat to electronic medical records and exchange of personal information. Moreover, software’s traceability features allow the hospitals to collect detailed information about the preparations dispensed, creating a database of every treatment that can be used for research purposes.
Concepts and definitions
Health information technology (HIT) is “the application of information processing involving both computer hardware and software that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and use of health care information, health data, and knowledge for communication and decision making”. Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species’ usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species’ ability to control and adapt to its environment. However, a strict definition is elusive; “technology” can refer to material objects of use to humanity, such as machines, hardware or utensils, but can also encompass broader themes, including systems, methods of organization, and techniques. For HIT, technology represents computers and communications attributes that can be networked to build systems for moving health information. Informatics is yet another integral aspect of HIT.
Informatics refers to the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics underlies the academic investigation and practitioner application of computing and communications technology to healthcare, health education, and biomedical research. Health informatics refers to the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. Health informatics describes the use and sharing of information within the healthcare industry with contributions from computer science, mathematics, and psychology. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required for optimizing the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. Medical informatics, nursing informatics, public health informatics, pharmacy informatics, and translational bioinformatics are subdisciplines that inform health informatics from different disciplinary perspectives. The processes and people of concern or study are the main variables.
Implementation.
The Institute of Medicine’s (2001) call for the use of electronic prescribing systems in all healthcare organizations by 2010 heightened the urgency to accelerate United States hospitals’ adoption of CPOE systems. In 2004, President Bush signed an Executive Order titled the President’s Health Information Technology Plan, which established a ten-year plan to develop and implement electronic medical record systems across the US to improve the efficiency and safety of care. According to a study by RAND Health, the US healthcare system could save more than $81 billion annually, reduce adverse healthcare events and improve the quality of care if it were to widely adopt health information technology.
Health IT (health information technology) is the area of IT involving the design, development, creation, use and maintenance of information systems for the healthcare industry. Automated and interoperable healthcare information systems will continue to improve medical care and public health, lower costs, increase efficiency, reduce errors and improve patient satisfaction, while also optimizing reimbursement for ambulatory and inpatient healthcare providers.
Today, the importance of health IT results from the combination of evolving technology and changing government policies that influence the quality of patient care. Modern health IT received a boost when President George W. Bush introduced incentives for hospitals to adopt electronic health record (EHR) systems, and that march has continued with Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, showing that health IT enjoys general bipartisan support.
Types of health information technology
The EHR is the central component of the health IT infrastructure. An EHR, or electronic medical record (EMR), is a person’s official, digital health record and is shared among multiple healthcare providers and agencies. Other key elements of the health IT infrastructure are the personal health record (PHR), which is a person’s self-maintained health record, and the health information exchange (HIE), a health data clearinghouse or a group of healthcare organizations that enter into an interoperability pact and agree to share data between their various health IT systems. Thanks to smartphones and other mobile devices, in the coming years, PHRs will grow in popularity as consumers become more comfortable with their digital health information. Thus, PHRs will need to integrate further with EHR technology.
As a result of the mountain of patient information that healthcare organizations now sit on, data analytics has taken a greater role in day-to-day operations. The ability to aggregate patient information, analyze it and then base treatments on the results fits in well with population health management (PHM) and value-based healthcare. Artificial intelligence will take analytics to a higher level, although, as of 2018, AI is not relied upon for diagnoses. Analytics also raises the question of who owns the data: the patient, the healthcare organization or the vendor that produced the analytics software? Trends in healthcare point to patients ultimately becoming the owners.
There are other important health IT technologies beyond EHRs. Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) are two widely used types of health IT that help healthcare professionals store and manage patients’ medical images. In the past, radiology departments have been the primary repositories of medical images, but PACS and VNAs are integrating radiology into the main hospital workflow. And other specialties, such as cardiology and neurology, have also become large-scale producers of clinical images. In some instances, VNAs have been installed as a way to merge imaging data stored in separate departments’ image banks in a multifacility healthcare system.
Improvements in health technology include patient portals, which are not new but are enjoying a second wind at hospitals and physician practices thanks to more consumer-friendly designs. In earlier days, a patient portal may have been a clunky site that enabled patients to view upcoming visits and perhaps see raw lab test results. By comparison, modern portals provide more context to a patient’s care. The portals let patients securely communicate with their physicians, pay bills, check services against what an insurance plan allows, download full medical records, order prescriptions and possibly interact with a chatbot for other services.
Portals may also integrate with telemedicine systems, which enable secure video conversations between patients and providers. As the ease and convenience of video conferencing improves, telemedicine will be an important piece of the healthcare experience for patients who may need to speak to a physician or nurse face-to-face but do not necessarily need an in-office visit.
More recent innovations in health IT technology include the greater use of the application program interface (API) to improve interoperability, the ability to access and interact with health data via mobile devices and further exploration of blockchain as a way to better access and secure medical records.
Regulations and oversight
Implementations of EHR systems have increased dramatically in the past few years since the inception of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, which introduced EHR incentive programs and the related meaningful use program. Physicians and hospitals that proved their use of government-certified EHR systems met meaningful use criteria — created and overseen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) — were eligible to receive incentive payments totaling tens of billions of dollars across the U.S. healthcare industry.
Meaningful use is changing to a new value-based reimbursement system under a law passed by Congress in 2015 called MACRA, the Medicare Access and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) Reauthorization Act. Meanwhile, the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 poured $6 billion into medical research using leading-edge technology and science.
Also, healthcare organizations and their business associates, such as third-party billing companies, that handle protected health information (PHI) are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), created and enforced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The law mandates that patients have full access to their PHI and protects the privacy of their information by limiting access to it by other parties. A healthcare provider that experiences a breach of PHI can be fined by the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
Security and privacy
HIPAA’s security and privacy rules have long guided healthcare organizations to provide patients access to their medical records, while also safeguarding that information.
Such goals have taken on greater urgency given that data breaches and malware attacks have scourged the healthcare industry since 2010. Nearly 5.6 million patients had their records breached in 2017, and although the amount of patient data breaches dropped that year, malware and ransomware attacks on healthcare sites increased, according to a 2018 report from Protenus, a health IT privacy and security firm.
In response, traditional health IT systems now often integrate with data security and cybersecurity technology. Worker education is also part of the solution, as human errors can lead to data breaches.
Changes to the workforce
As in many industries, IT managers and chief information officers (CIOs) in healthcare organizations have risen in authority as technology becomes more prevalent.
The growing position of informatician, or informaticist, ties directly to the expansion of health IT. Under health informatics and its variants, professionals manage and study health IT and patient data together. Informaticians may have an IT background or a clinical background, but in both cases, these people combine science, medical treatments and IT. For example, a clinical informaticist could be someone with a background as a bedside nurse who transitions to an IT-based role.
Also, there is a subset of practicing physicians and nurses who have also become experts in health IT and patient data matters. Although these clinicians remain firmly embedded in patient care, they are able to more easily converse with IT about their needs and the technology options available.
In a broader sense, health IT has affected every clinician who has trained on an EHR or telemedicine systems, and working with this technology has become a core job skill.
Benefits of health information technology
While some critics say EHRs have led to clinicians spending more time entering data than conversing with patients and produced cumbersome federal regulations, there is broad consensus on the benefits of health IT. These advantages include:
- the ability to use data analytics and big data to effectively manage population health management programs and reduce the incidence of expensive chronic health conditions;
- the use of cognitive computing and analytics to perform precision medicine (PM) tailored to individual patients;
- the ability to share health data among academic researchers to develop new medical therapies and drugs; and
- the rights of patients to obtain and use their own health data and collaborate in their own care with clinicians.
Other health IT challenges
Some major challenges persist in health IT. Chief among them are obstacles to interoperability, including a lack of commonly agreed-on health data interchange standards, although the health IT standard-developing organization HL7 International (Health Level Seven) has developed and promulgated several popular standards — most recently, FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources).
Also, federal officials and patient advocates have identified as a pervasive problem the alleged practice of information blocking by some vendors and providers in an attempt to stymie the ability to share health data in their systems. Health regulators have made it increasingly clear that they will not tolerate information blocking.
Telemedicine
Telemedicine refers to the provision of remote clinical services, via real-time two-way communication between the patient and the healthcare provider, using electronic audio and visual means.
What is telehealth (telemedicine)
Telehealth, also referred to as telemedicine or e-medicine, is the remote delivery of healthcare services over the telecommunications infrastructure.
Telehealth allows healthcare providers to evaluate, diagnose, inform and treat patients without an in-person visit. Patients can communicate with physicians from their homes using their own personal technology or by visiting a dedicated telehealth kiosk.
A typical telehealth exam involves downloading an application or calling a telehealth number, provided by a physician’s office or patient’s employer as part of health insurance benefits. After sharing information about medical history and symptoms, the remote patient will be connected to a clinician. Based on the clinician’s evaluation, the call will end with the patient receiving further instructions, such as what over-the-counter or prescription medication to take, and whether they need a follow-up appointment
Medical diagnosis software is a digital platform for clinical diagnosis with high speed and precision. Advanced medical diagnostics systems leverage healthcare automation technologies for assessing large amounts of data related to patient health and producing accurate diagnoses.
Medical Diagnostic Systems
Medical diagnostic programs and systems are a type of software system that leverages the power of artificial intelligence
to evaluate and analyze available patient data and reach an intelligent and accurate diagnosis. A medical diagnostic system also consists of a medical diagnostic imaging system that helps process diagnostic images to further enhance the accuracy of your diagnoses. And Folio3 has been providing the state of the art medical imaging software development to their client to provide and have the best and most accurate telehealth experiences. The main function of this system is to facilitate and automate the diagnostic process while minimizing any chances of error.
These clinical diagnostic systems use artificial intelligence as well as machine learning technology to ensure absolute precision while handling diagnoses.
Our medical diagnostic solutions help healthcare organizations because there are a lot of laws and regulations to be followed and even a slightly inaccurate diagnosis can have unfavorable consequences including lawsuits and increased regulatory costs.
What Is PACS?
Perhaps you’ve heard of PACS but aren’t quite sure what it means. Simply put, PACS is a picture archiving and communications system. This system electronically stores images and reports, instead of using the old method of manually filing, retrieving and transporting film jackets, which are used for storing X-ray film.
The Four Basic Components of PACS
The system consist of four basic components, which include:
- Imaging modalities—This is the image system for doing the actual scanning of a patient in producing a medical image.
- Secure network to the database for the image to be uploaded and transferred
- Workstation for allowing radiologists and doctors to view and study the image
- Archives for storage—Another main component is a secure storage area in which the image and its supporting documents can be available for the people who are permitted to view it.
The Benefits of Combining PACS Software With RIS
Radiologists have a special interest for using PACS software.
- Consider how radiology PACS are often arranged beside a radiology information system or RIS.
- A radiology information system is a system that radiologists use for recording patient radiology histories as well as for scheduling appointments. However, the primary purpose of PACS is for storing and retrieving images.
- When PACS software is combined with a RIS, a hospital radiology department functions better because images can be securely stored, retrieved and transferred.
Other Advantages
There are other benefits of using PACS in radiology, such as:
- Patient data is better organized—Patient radiology reports are stored in a more orderly fashion as they’re digitally stored. Rather than having to sift through a pile of paperwork, physicians can easily access patient files by using the software.
- Better visualization of images—The wide range of tools offer enhanced visualization of images as they can be manipulated electronically for visual enlargement. For example, images can be rotated for creating 3D images of tissues, organs, blood vessels and bones. As a result, data can be interpreted and analyzed better.
- Financial savings are another significant plus—There’s no need to print films. The cloud-based system makes it easy to see images and reports by using software on digital devices. In other words, you save money because you don’t have to pay for film, ink or printing expenses. What’s more, you save on not having to pay a staff for these services.
How Patients Can Benefit
There are also several benefits for patients.
- Patients can receive a more accurate diagnosis because of the high-quality images.
- One of the main benefits for patients is that there’s less radiation exposure
- There’s less need for retaking images.
- Examination time is shorter since patients don’t have to be reexamined.
- Furthermore, there’s less of a threat for side effects.
Other Benefits and Considerations
- PACS let you store standard 2D images alongside 3D images.
- You can reduce the number of identical images, which makes data management more efficient.
- It allows for a chronological view of a patient’s radiology history.
- With PACS, surgeons can see images before their patients return to an exam room. In addition to improving the quality of patient care, this speeds up workflow.
- PACS provide remote access. This means physicians in faraway physical areas can obtain immediate access to the same data for teleradiology.
- Hospitals also benefit. Some of these perks include improved communication with doctors, along with an improvement in hospital administration. Another plus is that staff retention improves because hospital morale is more positive.
- Although radiologists used to be the predominate users, PACS is now being incorporated into other medical fields, such as cardiology, oncology, pathology, dermatology and nuclear medicine imaging.
Telecardiology is a modern medical practice that uses the power of telecommunications to achieve the remote diagnosis and treatment of heart disease. This includes coronary heart disease, both chronic and acute, as well as arrhythmias, congestive cardiac failure, and sudden cardiac arrest.
In this situation, doctors and other healthcare providers use electrocardiographic data, which is transmitted remotely, in real-time, for interpretation by a specialist. This enables specialist care to be accessed by people in remote locations. Advancing technology is making it easier and less expensive to set up wireless or satellite networks for this purpose, thereby increasing their effectiveness and ease.
How telecardiology works
The practice of telecardiology depends on the availability of a specialized device, which not only takes and records a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) in the primary care setting but also transmits the ECG image in the form of a sound signal over the telephone line.
At the other end, namely, the telecardiology facility, this data is converted back into an image on the screen. After specialists interpret this information, an oral report is quickly sent, while a written summary is emailed or faxed to the patient hub. All ECGs are stored in an electronic database at the telecardiology center to enable future comparison of ECGs for the same patient over time.
Single-lead ECG machines are available in the form of a watch-like device to enable quick monitoring when the patient needs it while still at home. This allows for a better interpretation and diagnosis of the disease condition.
This device can store the recorded images and transmit them to the specialist once the patient reaches their doctor’s office. The advantage of this approach is that the patient does not need to wait to reach the doctor’s office and can instead record the ECG as and when symptoms arise.
Hospital Information Systems (HIS)
What is Hospital Information Systems (HIS)?
The term Hospital Information Systems (HIS) refers to the component of health informatics that places focus largely on the administrative, financial, and clinical needs of hospitals. These systems augment the ability of healthcare professionals to coordinate care by providing a patient’s health information and visit history at the place and time that it is required. So basically, HIS is designed to manage patients and their related information in a centralised way via electronic data processing and predict health status within the hospital environment. No doubt, it has as its aim to provide better healthcare service with precision accuracy.
How Do Hospital Information Systems Work?
The hospital information system operates online and covers the relevant hospital network through the intranet. Database servers are used to store information on the medicines that are required to cure relevant illnesses. It also schedules online appointments for doctors; and it manages the payment records of patients.
Teledermatology refers to the use of static digital images to triage, diagnose, monitor or assess skin conditions without the patient being physically present.
Teledermatology is a subspecialty in the medical field of dermatology and probably one of the most common applications of telemedicine and e-health. In teledermatology, telecommunication technologies are used to exchange medical information (concerning skin conditions and tumours of the skin) over a distance using audio, visual, and data communication. Applications comprise health care management such as diagnoses, consultation, and treatment as well as (continuous) education.
The dermatologists Perednia and Brown were the first to coin the term “teledermatology” in 1995. In a scientific publication, they described the value of a teledermatologic service in a rural area underserved by dermatologists.
An LIS is a software system that records, manages, updates, and stores patient testing data for clinical and anatomic pathology laboratories, including receiving test orders, sending orders to laboratory analyzers, tracking orders, results, and quality control, and transmitting results to an EHR, practice management …
What is LIS Software?
A laboratory information system (LIS) is a healthcare software solution that processes, stores, and manages patient data related to laboratory processes and testing. Providers and laboratory professionals use laboratory information systems to coordinate the workflow and quality control of inpatient and outpatient medical testing, including hematology, chemistry, immunology, microbiology, toxicology, public health, and other laboratory areas. Laboratory information systems track, store, and update clinical details about a patient during a provider visit and stores the information in its database for future reference.
What is the Difference Between LIS & LIMS?
Laboratory information system (LIS) and laboratory information management system (LIMS) are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, and while the two overlap, they were designed to support different laboratory types and functionality. LIS is traditionally used to refer to systems that support healthcare clinical settings and patient-specific specimens. LIMS were historically designed to support sample-centric laboratory requirements, such as those of clinical research, or other non-clinical laboratory settings. Today, the functionality of the two systems overlaps greatly and there are many features in both the LIS and LIMS that accompany the traditional functionality of the other.
A laboratory information system (LIS) is computer software that processes, stores and manages data from all stages of medical processes and tests.
Physicians and lab technicians use laboratory information systems to coordinate varieties of inpatient and outpatient medical testing, including hematology, chemistry, immunology and microbiology. Basic laboratory information systems commonly have features that manage patient check in, order entry, specimen processing, result entry and patient demographics. An LIS tracks and stores clinical details about a patient during a lab visit and keeps the information stored in its database for future reference.
A closely related technology to LIS is a laboratory information management system (LIMS), but there are differences between the two software types. An LIS is a healthcare system that holds clinical data. By comparison, an LIMS can be deployed in healthcare, too, but it is also used in non-medical settings, including in environmental testing laboratories, pharmaceutical laboratories and water treatment plants. An LIMS can be used as a Web tool or installed on a personal computer or device and stores and manages captured data, as well as producing reports from that data.
The electronic data capture process of an LIMS or LIS can reduce time spent and cut errors associated with the transcribing process.
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is an application that analyzes data to help healthcare providers make decisions and improve patient care.
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology that provides clinicians, staff, patients, and other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information to help health and health care. CDSS encompasses a variety of tools to enhance decision-making in the clinical workflow. These tools include computerized alerts and reminders to care providers and patients, clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, focused patient data reports and summaries, documentation templates, diagnostic support, and contextually relevant reference information, among other tools. Robert Hayward of the Centre has proposed a working definition for Health Evidence: “Clinical decision support systems link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care”.[1] CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine