Health Informatics Assignment Week 13 to 15

Week 13 Questions

  • Briefly explain the differences among an HCO’s operational, planning, communications, and documentary requirements for information. Give two examples in each category. Choose one of these categories, and discuss similarities and differences in the environments of a tertiary-care medical center, a community-based ambulatory-care clinic, and a specialty-care physician’s office. Describe the implied differences in these units’ information requirements.
  • Describe three situations in which the separation of clinical and administrative information could lead to inadequate patient care, loss of revenue, or inappropriate administrative decisions. Identify and discuss the challenges and limitations of two methods for improving data integration.
  • Describe three situations in which lack of integration of information systems with clinicians’ workflow can lead to inadequate patient care, reduced physician productivity, or poor patient satisfaction with an HCO’s services. Identify and discuss the challenges and limitations of two methods for improving process integration.
  • Describe the trade-off between functionality and integration. Discuss three strategies currently used by HCOs to minimize this tradeoff.
  • Assume that you are the chief information officer of a multi-facility HCO. You havejust been charged with planning a new HCIS to support a large tertiary care medical center, two smaller community hospitals, a nursing home, and a 40-physician group practice. Each organization currently operates its own set of integrated and standalone technologies and applications. What technical and organizational factors must you consider? What are the three largest challenges you will face over the next 24 months?
  • How do you think the implementation of HCISs will affect the quality of relationships between patients and providers? Discuss at least three potential positive and three potential negative effects. What steps would you take to maximize the positive value of these systems?
  • Week 14 Questions

    Questions for Discussion

  • Telehealth has evolved from systems designed primarily to support consultations between clinicians to systems that provide direct patient care. This has required changes in hardware, user interfaces, software, and processes. Discuss some of the changes that must be made when a system designed for use by health care professionals is modified to be used directly by patients.
  • Some people involved in CHI advocate that any publicly accessible health information be credentialed (reviewed and certified as accurate) by a professional body. Other people argue that credentialing is antithetical to the consumerist perspective. Assume and defend one of these perspectives.
  • Using CHI and telehealth systems, patients can now have interaction with a large number of health care providers, organizations and resources. As a result, coordination of care becomes increasingly difficult. Two solutions have been proposed. One is to develop better ways to transfer patient-related information among existing EHRs. The other is to give the give the patient control of the health record, either by giving them a smart card or placing the records on a central web site controlled by the patient. Assume and defend one of these perspectives.
  • Week 15 Questions

  • What are the current and potential effects of a) the genomics revolution; and b) 9/11 on public health informatics?
  • How can the successful model of immunization registries be used in other domains of public health (be specific about those domains)? How might it fail in others? Why?
  • Fourteen percent of the US GDP is spent on medical care (including public health). How could public health informatics help use those monies more efficiently? Or lower the figure absolutely?
  • Compare and contrast the database desiderata for clinical versus public health information systems. Explain it from non-technical and technical perspectives.
  • Make the case for and against investing billions in an NHII.
  • What organizational options would you consider if you were beginning the development of a local health information infrastructure? What are the pros and cons of each? How would you proceed with making a decision about which one to use?
  • If public health informatics (PHI) involves the application of information technology in any manner that improves or promotes human health, does this necessarily involve a human “user” that interacts with the PHI application? For example, could the information technology underlying anti-lock braking systems be considered a public health informatics application?