Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay
The convergence of technology in the 21st century has enabled many healthcare organizations to adopt technology products that avail informational resources, patient-related information, employee information and terms, decision support tools and other features that are important to the delivery of safe and efficient healthcare (Rada, 2008).Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay
This paper reports the findings of an interview conducted with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Pine Breeze health facility regarding the databases available to both clinical and administrative personnel. In the interview, the CIO acknowledged that the healthcare organization had adopted four tiers of clinical databases, namely: clinical decision support systems, electronic medical registers, general healthcare information meant for patients, and telemedicine.
These tiers, according to the CIO, are implemented on secure internet-based protocols, with two of the tiers – decision support systems and electronic medical registers – integrated into a multi-institutional framework serving 50 health facilities in the region.Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay
The interviewee particularly stressed the importance of clinical databases and electronic patient information databases in ensuring efficient, consistent and error-free delivery of health services. According to Health Hero Network (2009), “…clinical databases consist of observational data collected on patients who meet specific criteria” (para. 1).
The respondent further clarified that clinical databases are institutional-specific, multi-institutional, and population-based. Institutional-based clinical databases dealt with information about patients visiting this particular health facility while multi-institutional databases profiled patient accruals in multiple health facilities.
Health Hero Network (2009) posits that multi-institutional databases are often used to address challenges related to inter-facility discrepancies and to develop statistical paradigms to forecast patient results based on prognostic factors. Population-based clinical databases are often required in the healthcare context to evaluate disease incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates not only in the health facility but also across the region.
The CIO also took time to explain how the facility has adopted decision support systems and electronic patient health information registers and how these adoptions have aided the facility to provide cost-effective care and treatment to patients. Electronic health registers, according to Rada (2008), facilitates the fast retrieval of patient health information thus saving lives.Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay
Decision support systems aid clinicians to make well-informed decisions by making reference to online resources about the best practices in the management of a particular health condition (Rada, 2008). Several databases are available for the administrative personnel in the health facility.
The human resource department has access to databases containing employee information, duty scheduling, rewards and promotion, training, and organizational ethics. The general management division has access to databases related to the organization’s vision, mission, and policies.Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay
Beaver (2003) argues that administrative information must be harmonized with the broader goals and objectives of the institution, thus the need to develop effective administrative databases. From the interview, it was learned that some of the patient information and data is used administratively when it comes to dealing with issues of health insurance, claims and reimbursement, and in evaluating the facility’s effectiveness in the provision of care.
The respondent reported that the main responsibility of the information and communication department in the health facility is to oversee the efficient running of these databases since the health facility has realized that information is power.
Clinical databases take the bulk of time of ICT personnel since they require constant upgrading to update them on the industry’s best practices. Additionally, they require to be continually upgraded to demonstrate the true picture of a particular health condition affecting patients across several health facilities (Beaver, 2003).
Reference List
Beaver, K. (2003). Healthcare information systems, 2nd Ed. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press LLC
Health Hero Network. (2009). Decision support tools. Web.Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay