Medical Informatics: Past, Present, Future, Research Paper Example

Introduction

What is health informatics? Health informatics is a medical term that bridges an evolving medical field including computer science field, information technology, healthcare collaborative communication, and large amounts of medical data. It involves systems such as electronic health records (EHR), health information interchange standards, and movable medical devices”(USF Health, 2015). In most medical environments health informatics is defined as the retrieval, storing and acquiring healthcare data to ensure quality collaborations among patient, physician, hospitals, and all other providers within the patients’ medical exchange network. Health informatics focuses on clinical advances to create quality data to improve the quality of the patients. There are different categories of health informatics that is within the healthcare systems that make up the integrated medical informatics system. The health informatics umbrella is medical informatics, clinical informatics, nursing informatics, dental informatics, bioinformatics, dental informatics, and veterinary informatics (Kramer, 2012).

The University of Virginia School of Medicine (2015) defines health informatics as a science that integrates the application and investigation of diverse informatics including information technology that is widely utilize in the medical arena and medical research. This technologies advantages resources, software, and hardware to assist with storing, retrieving, and disseminating of healthcare information. The health informatics benefits are far reaching from data mining, healthcare care records to data retrieval, storage and sorting critical healthcare data.

History of informatics

The humble beginnings of healthcare informatics originally begin in the 1960s, under the authority of ASTM(American Society for Testing and Materials) which has a new name called ASTM International. This was the first time in history that an organization started to develop healthcare informatics standards. The goal was to allow scientist and medical laboratories to communicate utilizing a laboratory message board sharing research, medical breakthroughs, and clinical data. In addition, to further advancing the electronic health systems including its data to ensure the transmitting of data would be secure and private (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society(HIMSS, 2014). ASTM is still recognized today as one the first organizations to developed healthcare informatics standards. The early years of medical informatics did not have any standards and healthcare information and data was fragmented. The healthcare exchange network of hospitals, patients, physicians and other facilities were not able to share information. The need to improve patient care started with the ability to share healthcare data that could be critical in saving a patient because of the patients medical history shared over the exchange. The best example is a patient in Chicago that has a heart attack but they live in Florida. The patient’s primary physician and hospital records are located in Florida. The patient needs emergency heart surgery to replace a block heart value. The patient has the surgery but his medical records indicated the patient does not respond to open chest surgery. Therefore, the physician did not perform surgery but treatment with innovative medical therapy. In 1960, that same patient would have died in surgery because the healthcare industry did not have health informatics to share that critical data concerning the patient’s surgery history.

Historically, in the prior to the late 1960’s, the health informatics system was unable to store, share, and acquirecritical healthcare data to improve patient care and healthcare exchange communication. The arrival of innovative medical technology growth demanded a new health informatics systemto be put in place. The new set of standards would address the needs of fragmented medical standards for the highly specialized groups with a set of unique needs.

This initiated the dawn of new standards because the industry of computer sciences, scientist, laboratories, and medical technology realized a need across several informatics spectrums. The development of new standards for healthcare information and data generated a new direction and potential to have a coordinated and shared collaboration for the new standards of the future. ASTM started the collaboration and input stages concerning electronic health systems, which related to every medical professional. The best example is the nursing healthcare information data that relies on medical terminologies however, the standards for relaying this information was in fragmented data elements. In order, to improve the delivery of healthcare systems and improve the patient care, it because necessity to develop some standard common data elements. At that point, in history, the collaboration of health informatics standards was non-existent because the healthcare system had too many gaps while no organization was addressing the standard’s needs.

Major Milestones

The first important milestone in the field of healthcare informatics standards started in the 1960s. The One of the earliest efforts took place under the jurisdiction of ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials is credited for the initial reform of standards for laboratory message exchange, properties for electronic health record systems, data content, and health information system security. This milestone was important because health informatics was fragmented preventing the critical sharing of healthcare data.

The second important milestone was the Ledley and Lusted’sgroundbreaking manuscript that exposed the industry to diagnostic decision making that reviewed methods for decision making under risk and ambiguity. The paper brought to the forefront collaborative discussion concerning computer based computer-based decision-making support (Haux, 2010). The third milestone was the creation of the College of American Pathologist who is internationally recognized as Systematized Nomenclature of Human Veterinary Medicine. The pathology industry did not have a set of guidelines for their specific health informatics. This establishment was the trailblazer that started this historical milestone of developing health informatics standards for the pathology industry (HIMSS, 2013). The fourth milestones is the peer review papers that impacted the medical informatics industry was written by J.H. Van Bemmel who set the groundwork for the essential summary of medical informatics which open the possibilities to technology that would contribute to improvinghealth informatics standards(Haux,2010).

The final milestone is the most important in the healthcare industry today. Almost everyone is familiar with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1986 that was designed to protect healthcare protected information. This final milestone was the development of standardized informatics started in 1991 by ANSI Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (HISB). The healthcare informatics standards were developed to coordinate and collaborate global healthcare informatics. ANSI HISB has was credited for gathering an all-encompassing portfolio of benchmarks that influenced the selection procedure for the new transaction and code set standards for HIPAA.Administrative (HIMSS, 2013). The HIPAA Administration Simplification is the foundation of healthcare data policies and procedures that is followed by the entire healthcare industry. The HIPAA laws have standardized electronic processing of claims allowing data to be shared with insurance companies shared globally.

Creation of Health Informatics

The idea of health informatics created by with Gustav Wager from Germany in 1949. Gustav was credited for developing the first professional organization for informatics. He was the original pioneer that provided the foundation, groundwork, and birth of informatics in the healthcare system in Europe and the rest of the plant (Kramer, 2012).The generation of this organization brought together scientist, biomedical, pharmaceutical, hospitals, and the healthcare industry.

Evolution Health Informatics

In the 1960s, the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) was the leader that created standards for the laboratory message exchange, electronic health record systems, and health information system security. This was the first collaboration to create standardized healthcare informatics (HIMSS, 2013). The College of American Pathologists followed in 1965 by developing a classification for pathology that is recognized around the world, which is known as Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine.

The next evolution was the development of the 1987 Health Level Seven (HL7), which developed a standard message format for patient data that was published the same year (HIMSS, 2013). The next evolution was in 1991, the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12N is well known to those that work with electronic claims that are submitted from the hospital to the insurance companies for payment. At that point, in history, there were hundreds of different standards being used in the United States? The ACS insurance subcommittee developed standards for communication of claims and financial transactions (Kramer, 2012). In 1991, the ANSI Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (HISB) was implemented. This organization was developed in response to the European developing health informatics guidelines. As a result, health informatics standards were developed nationally by conducting an extensive inventory of standards that contributed to the selection process for the proposed transaction and code set standards under the HIPAA legislation (HIMSS, 2013).

References

Healthcare Information and Management Systems(HIMSS). (2014).Evolution of healthcare Informaticsstandards. Retrieved January 20, 2015 from http://www.himss.org/library/interoperability-standards/Evolution-of-Healthcare Informatics-Standards

Haux, R. (2010).Commentary: Medical informatics: Past, present, future. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 79,599-610

Kramer, A. (2012).The history of health informatics: Presentation Prezi. Retrieved January 20, 2015 from https://prezi.com/zw5yzjw1sv1_/the-history-of-health-informatics/

University of Virginia School of Medicine. (2015).Health informatics defined. Retrieved January 20, 2015 from http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/phs/administrative-divisions/informatics/HealthInfDef-page

USF Health. (2015).What is healthcare informatics? Retrieved on January 20 from http://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/healthcare/what-is-healthinformatics/#.VMBHSektGUk