With the rapid growth of technology today, the medical field has adopted technology to enable it increase the productivity of most health care professionals. After an interview with the IT director at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, it is true that there are various areas where technology has been adopted in the medical field. These areas include the concept of Health Information Management (HIM), development of assistive technology, use of painless needles, improved life expectancy though technological advancement in treatments and surgeries, use of robots that dispense prescriptions, and cloning.
Health Information Management (HIM) is one of the critical areas of technology that has received significant attention from various medical practitioners in different parts of the world. This is because it has significantly improved the efficiency of medical experts in different medical institutions. It mostly focuses on the maintenance of health care records. It involves the shift from traditional health records to electronic means of record keeping. The main bodies that are influenced by Health Information Management include health insurance companies, hospitals, health departments, physicians’ offices, and other facilities that keep health records or provide health care (Thakkar & Davis, 2006).
Since there has been widespread computerization within the health care sector, concepts associated with HIM such as health information technology, health administration functions, and health informatics have become more effective and efficient. It is therefore the role of the Health Information Management professionals to ensure that they identify the current and the future information needs of medical institutions in order to meet their ethical, administrative, professional and legal requirements of record keeping.
Medical health professionals also play a very big role in ensuring that Health Information Management is successfully implemented. They do this because they know the benefits that this concept brings to institutions. The senior management in medical institutions therefore makes sure that their members of staff are proficient in various computer application packages so that they can handle health records keenly.
Health Information Management benefits both the patients and the medical practitioners. Efficiency in the workplace is therefore attained when an organization implements information systems contrary to those institutions that fail to do so. This is because Health Information Management facilitates coordination of staff and also ensures that documents which belong to particular patients can be retrieved thereby making it easy to trace the history of patients’ illnesses. This makes it possible for the physicians to give the right prescriptions to the patients (Thakkar & Davis, 2006). A person using information systems also saves time while undertaking certain specified tasks. This is because information systems are much faster compared to when a person undertakes the activities manually.
The implementation of Health Information Management also encounters various challenges. For example, the cost of buying computer hardware is very high. This makes it difficult for small medical organizations to implement this type of technology effectively. It is also costly and time-consuming to train all the staffs in an organization to use information systems. In addition, it has been observed that most physicians rarely make use of information systems (Thakkar & Davis, 2006). This issue has therefore brought down the efficiency and effectiveness of medical staff in different medical institutions.
Reference
Thakkar, M., & Davis, D. C. (2006). Risks, Barriers, and Benefits of EHR Systems: A Comparative Study Based on Size of Hospital. Web.