Inpatient Clinical Information System
Description
The system is meant to control admission, discharge, and transfer of patients. It provides an opportunity to schedule beds and hospital resources. The system allows us to calculate bills and track other types of patient information.
Significance
The automation of tracking and planning hospital functionalities in inpatient care delivery is characterized by time-efficiency – the localized electronic storage of patient information requires lesser efforts for the investigation of patient episodes and helps to reduce organizational errors.
Impact on Care Delivery
The system allows us to monitor the dynamic and continuous changes in patient treatment and to make intervention adjustments more easily. The system supports communication among clinical staff members. Care plans, electronic documents, nurses notes, automatic reminders, and alerts help to assess treatment progress and efficiency of care administration in each particular case. It facilitates the development of an individualized approach to every patient.
Advantages
The system is associated with quality improvement in health care delivery, patient safety, reduction of the likelihood of error occurrence, and minimization of harm (Lehmann, 2015).
Challenges
The system functionalities are diverse and have different levels of complexity. The implementation of all features requires a sufficient level of training and expertise in the system operation.
Patient Confidentiality
Patient information is applied only within the organization, and the electronic records may be shared among the staff members. The disclosure of personal information is possible merely with a patient’s consent.
Laboratory Information System (LIS)
Description
LIS is comprised of pre-analytical (sample delivery and registration), analytical (modeling, technical validation, etc.), and post-analytical (data presentation, archiving, etc.) functionalities that ensure efficient laboratory information management (Kammergruber, Robold, Karliç, & Durner, 2014).
Significance
The system is meant to keep laboratory test data. LIS indicators are correlated with other electronic medical records, and it automatically uploads the test results and details to a particular patient record.
Impact on Care Delivery
LIS significantly reduces the time for the communication between general care and laboratory service departments and, in this way, it facilitates the workflow and increases the quality of care delivery.
Advantages
Cost-efficiency and error reduction are the major advantages of the system implementation.
Challenges
Currently, LIS data is not available to billing and statistics programs. Therefore, additional efforts for the manual calculations are required.
Patient Confidentiality
LIS information reporting and data access are secured by the software system that functions in the background. Therefore, the opportunity to abuse confidential information is minimized.
Radiology Information System (RIS)
Description
RIS is meant to store and transfer the visual representation of data collected at the hospital’s radiology center. Radiology data includes images from X-ray machines, computed tomography examinations, magnetic resonance results, mammography, ultrasound, etc.
Significance
RIS contributes to work efficiency increase due to its booking, scheduling, reporting, image tracking properties.
Impact on Care Delivery
The distribution of radiology images and information details to physicians and specialty doctors facilitates patient-doctor communication, increases diagnosis credibility, and the overall treatment outcomes.
Advantages
RIS benefits are the medical information exchange and time-efficiency that are associated with greater job satisfaction.
Challenges
A large body of information transferred by RIS requires a large disk capacity to store digital data.
Patient Confidentiality
Patient consent to share data records is required. RIS includes the function of role-based access control that is applied to restrict system access based on user privileges (The Royal College of Radiologists, 2008).
References
Kammergruber, R., Robold, S., Karliç, J., & Durner, J. (2014). The future of the laboratory information system – what are the requirements for a powerful system for laboratory data management?. Clinical Chemistry & Laboratory Medicine, 52(11), e225-e230. DOI:10.1515/cclm-2014-0276
Lehmann, C. U. (2015). Pediatric aspects of inpatient health information technology systems. Pediatrics, 135(3), e756-e768. DOI:10.1542/peds.2014-4148
The Royal College of Radiologists. (2008). Radiology information systems. Web.