Health Care Information Systems Definitions, Research Paper Example

Introduction

The following are definitions of some health care information system terms. Following after each definition is the description of the health care setting that each term can be applied to.

a) HIPAA

The acronym HIPAA refers to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, an act of Congress enacted in 1996 into the US law. Sponsored by Senator Nancy Kirshenbaum, a republican from Kansas and Senator Edward Kennedy, a democrat from Massachusetts, the act seeks to protect the health insurance coverage of the US workers and their families in the incidence of loosing or changing their employment (title one). Further, HIPAA provides for the Administrative Simplification (AS), which requires establishment of US national standards for all transactions in electronic health care (title two). Title two also provides for the establishment of national identifiers in the US to limit the amount of specified individual’s data all providers, employers and health insurance plans can access (Herdman, 2006).

In application, both the transaction national standards and the identifiers aim at helping the US public to keep the information they give to health and insurance practitioners private. Today however, most medical practitioners and the health insurance plans usually demand a waiver of the HIPAA rights from their clientele as the condition of receiving their services. The AS as provided for in HIPAA addresses issues of privacy and security of patient’s health data. The standards seek to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the US health care system (Herdman, 2006). This is done by the requirement for providers and health insurance plans in the country’s health care system to adopt standardized electronic data interchange.

b) Health Information

Health information is the ethereal data, knowledge and information about a particular patient. The information may be on past clinical routines, past diagnosis, past medications, past conditions etc. The information is stored by intelligent systems such as computerized databases.

Health information in the US is centrally stored for all patients of the health care providers and health insurance plans. The retrievable data storage is mainly intended to help doctors in diagnosing and treating new conditions in the patients, efficiently, promptly and effectively. Based on the efficient access to health information, doctors can easily make sound decisions and take appropriate actions to improve a patient’s health.

c) Data Accessibility

The term data accessibility refers to the ability and ease with which interested and specified persons can access any centrally stored data from an electronic system. This defines who should and can access specified data under specified circumstances. This is an established standard enacted to ensure that patient’s data is selectively accessible from a central database.

In the US health care industry, HIPAA introduced national identifiers and Administrative Simplification requirements where all patients’ data is centrally stored in an electronic data exchange. In this instance, data accessibility refers to the ability of persons in the healthcare industry such as providers to access patient’s data from the centralized system (Brody, 1987).

d) Data Relevancy

The term data relevancy simply refers to the correlation of the data one finds after a database search to what he or she was interested in, what he or she expected and what is usable in the situation at hand. Data relevancy is usually measured in percentages.

In practice, a patient may report to a new health care provider who needs to know the patient’s clinical history. Such data is available form the centralized electronic database on patients. When such a provider now tries to access the data from that central system, data relevancy will refer to how usable the data discovered is, how related to his quest and how helpful it is to diagnosis and or treatment of the current medical condition of the patient.

e) Protected Health Information (PHI)

Protected health information (PHI), is a provision of Act of Senate, popularly known as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). PHI requires that all and any information related to a patient’s health status, payment of health care services and provision of such health care services be protected. Any such information that can essentially be linked to a particular individual is protected by the US law.

In practice, PHI has been interpreted broadly to refer to a protection of any patient’s health care payment history and medical records. PHI is imposed on 18 identifiers as per the HIPAA provisions (Brody, 1987). Such identifiers include, patient’s names, geographical subdivisions that go any lower than a State, specific dates directly related to a particular individual, phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, medical record numbers, health plans beneficiary numbers, account numbers etc.

References

Brody, H. (1987). Stories of Sickness. Yale: Yale University Press.

Herdman, R. (2006). Effect of the HIPAA Privacy Rule on Health Research: Proceedings of a Workshop Presented to the National Cancer Policy Forum. Washington D.C.: National Academies Press.