Select the three informatics groups/specialty areas that you believe have the greatest
impact on informatics and rank them as to importance and preference. Papers must
address the following:
1) Provide comprehensive, accurate, and relevant information on the three informatics
groups selected.
2) Clearly state the impact the three groups you selected have had on informatics. Be sure
to present compelling arguments.
3) Define ranking and provide reasoning for ranked choices.
4) Incorporate history and current position within informatics of the three groups.
5) Note: This ranking will influence how you are grouped for the Collaborative Learning
Community assignments in this course.
Identify an area of interest, evaluate its current state, and discuss future trends and
challenges. Papers must address the following:
1) Provide a brief review of the various areas of health care informatics.
2) Select specific area of health care informatics and provide evaluation of current state.
3) Provide information on future trends with selected area of health care informatics.
4) Clarify the specific challenges for the selected area of health care informatics
Health care informatics
Introduction
Healthcare informatics, also regarded as medical informatics, biomedical informatics, clinical
informatics, nursing informatics, and biomedical informatics typically refers to intersection of
information technology, computer science in health care systems. This discipline deals with
devices, methods and the necessary resources in optimizing the storage, acquisition, retrieval and
utilization of health and medical information. In recent times, this has been applied in health
care areas such as public health, clinical practice, occupational therapy, dentist, medical and
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biomedical research, pharmacy, and other health groups such as admissions, finance, and
admissions. This paper evaluates the three informative groups that have been seen to have the
greatest impact on informatics i.e. clinical informatics, administrators, and nursing informatics.
Clinical Informatics
Clinical informatics refers to the application of information technology by practitioners in
offering of healthcare services. It is also referred as operational informatics and applied clinical
informatics. In essence, it is concerned with the use f of information within the healthcare
settings by the clinical staff. It involves a wide range of topics such as pathology, radiology,
dermatology, ophthalmology and so on. Moreover, it also deals with such issues as provision of
entry systems for orders, system designing, system implementation and adoption issues
(American Medical Informatics Association 2013).
In essence, clinical informatics assist clinical staff in such health matters as testing,
configuration, analyzing, testing, training or troubleshooting a particular operation within the
healthcare setting. For instance, clinical analyst may be very significant and helpful in
configuring the application of radiology within the health care setting, or those applications used
in the administrator’s offices. They could also assist in training the clinicians on the application
in the health care settings.
Nursing Informatics
The university of Maryland states that people opting to learn nursing informatics are
given responsibilities and roles of combining information technology, computer science and the
nursing science. These individuals are further mandated to incorporate system information, their
nursing knowledge, information and data into the nursing field. A practitioner in nursing
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informatics has a role in translating his or her patient’s needs and those of other staff into IT
programs in the sense that the technical support fully understands and improves the performance
in health care.
Practitioners in nursing informatics are not only responsible for entering information
and data into computers but they are also mandated to implementing the ever , policies,
procedures, programs and testing situations. Nurse informatics are also mandated with the task
of teaching trainees and other nurses on novel applications as well as processing new changes.
In addition, they make sure that findings from studies and reports are understandable to both
clients and other staff. They also offer technical writing support to other health staff besides
documenting technical solutions and specifications that satisfies public needs.
Administrative Informatics
The field of administrative informatics in healthcare is concerned with the acquisition,
evaluation, implementation as well as the daily activities of the Information systems in the
healthcare settings. These operations offer support to clinical and administrative roles within the
health care settings. This filed is closely related to its biomedical informatics counterparts.
Administrative informatics have become arguably very essential in the management of
clinical data and information essentially in this time when health records is becoming more
complicated and paramount to health provision. The standards, policies and regulations are
consistenly growing in scope and continue to remain crucial to health delivery. Administrative
informatics in healthcare is very essential with regard to service operations, cost reductions,
resource maintenance and upgrade, and enhancement of patient care through use of the standard
systems in electronic health records. Moreover, it is also crucial in upgrading the information
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systems for in other areas such as health research, billing, medical information exchange and
patient scheduling. Practitioners in health informatics in most cases provide leadership
functions in many departments in the healthcare settings.
Informatics Ranking
As defined by Pottel (1999), ranking is the connection between sets of items such that for
any two objects, one of them supersedes the other which is lower or equal to the other. The
ranking procedure ought to be in orderly manner. In this perspective, clinical informatics is
ranked as the first in significance, followed by nursing informatics and finally administrative
informatics.
Practitioners in clinical informatics health care services that is utterly invaluable in the
healthcare industry in general. These figures are also very important to clients who regularly
seek care and treatment from healthcare facilities and health practitioners. In essence, clinical
informatics offer an efficient means of storing, recording and the retrieving an all important
information that facilitates the smooth operations in the healthcare settings and to the efficient
provision of health care services. In employing clinical informatics, the all important and
crucial information from the patient’s charts including the heart rate, and blood pressure could be
automatically encoded into information systems such as electronic databases which could
consequently facilitate easy retrieval and analysis. The information tools which clinical
informatics relies on could assist a lot in preventing the administration of contraindicated or
conflicting drugs provide crucial information with regard to the patient’s problems and other
health issues, medical history of the patient and so on. The so crucial information that is stored
in such technological systems could be efficiently and quickly distributed to various health
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practitioners in the various health departments or medical/health facilities that are located in
some distances from each other. This kind of information sharing in health care is regarded as
“telemedicine” and has been very effective in assisting health care practitioners in treating or
diagnosing not only effectively, but also faster.
Although nursing informatics is also an important element in health care, it cannot be
rated the same as clinical informatics. This is because the former deals directly with the patients
while the latter is majorly focused on finding means of improvement the management of
information, healthcare communications, costs reductions and improvement of health service
delivery. Also unlike clinical informatics, few nurse informaticists undertake duties related to
patient care. Duties of clinical informatics professionals on the contrary are focused on the care
of their clients.
The administrative informatics in healthcare is on the other hand an emerging field
which has not extensively explored by health practitioners. The reason as to why these field
has come into focus is probably due to the consistent mistakes that are also costly made by
some health practitioners and health organizations in their course of implanting their health
data and information. This field also focuses on health administrators some of which are not
effective in handling IT related components. While others require full preparation and training
in information systems to be able to execute their mandate, there are those who are just
reluctant to learn the new systems and therefore, making this field less significant in health
settings when compares with clinical and nurse informatics.
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Reference
AMIA (2013). “Health Informatics”