The Language of Health Informatics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Language of Health Informatics - Essay Example Practically, a hospital database, for our purposes, is the collection of patient forms, only more organized and in electronic form. These two advantages, organization and accessibility, allow appropriate medical attention to be given faster, despite turnover of health care providers. For a former patient allergic to aspirin, rushed again to the hospital for his sudden blood pressure elevation, even if the nurses and doctors who attended to him are not part of the hospital already, the current HCPs will know they must provide non-aspirin medications. So going back to the original question, imagine as if you’re interviewing the patient again, what would be the usual questions you would ask him? Probably the complaint (why is the patient currently admitted?), the history of the complaint (i.e., Is this reoccurring?), and the past medical history (what other medical conditions did the patient have?). In addition, it is also important to note the medical history of the patients family. The contact details of the patient, as well as its closest family member should also be indicated in the database. As mentioned above, the accessibility of hospital databases serves to facilitate communication among HCPs or hospitals. The terminology, coding and standardization are thus important so that the hospitals can understand one another (Blair, 1999). For example, if the normal levels of substance A is 1-5 mg/ml for hospital A but 1-10 mg/ml for hospital B, then normal patients from hospital B may be getting treatment from hospital A if he/she is admitted to it. In addition, there must be universal identifier standards. This facilitates getting appropriate and adequate information from the database, This is especially important in life-threatening cases. For patient identifier, one option is the social security system (SSS) number, a unique one given to each citizen. However, the use of SSS number is open to violations of confidentiality because other institutions