Health Informatics Assignment Week 1 to 2

Week 0 (warm up) Assignment

1. True or False:

AMIA was started in 1967?

2. True or False:

The earliest use of computers in health informatics was in dental projects during late 50s in the US

3. True or False:

There were over 40 members at the first HMSS convention in the 1960s.

4. True or False:

The use of clinical guidelines and standardized protocols of care increased significantly during the 1970s

5. Which of the following is a challenge of health informatics?

1. Modern statistics and datasets used to compare symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments
2. Information is easily available in a digital format for healthcare professionals, the patient and possibly by family members as well (with proper authentication and credentials)
3. Protection and security of data and information is not only dependent on the systems and devices, but also on the professional’s actions.
4. Electronic systems decrease the time required for scheduling, storing data, and sending information

6. Which of the following is an HIM principle of health informatics?

1. Contribute to the selection and utilization of appropriate information technologies to meet business requirements.
2. Contribute to ongoing evaluation of the functionality of systems so that they can evolve to support best practice in clinical care.
3. Demonstrate knowledge of analysis, design, development and implementation of health information systems and applications
4. Demonstrate an understanding of architectural relationships between key health information technology components.

Week 1 Assignment

Questions for Discussion

1. How do you interpret the phrase “logical behaviour”? Do computers behave logically? Do people behave logically? Explain your answers.
2. What do you think it means to say that a computer program is “effective”? Make a list of a dozen computer applications with which you are familiar. List the applications in decreasing order of effectiveness, as you have explained this concept. Then, for each application, indicate your estimate of how well human beings perform the same tasks (this will require that you determine what it means for a human being to be effective). Do you discern any pattern? If so, how do you interpret it?
   

   Answer:

   Health care system is inefficient in understanding information systems, exploiting just for its distinctive strategic and operational functionality, as well as efficiently incorporating it into the workplace. Once knowledge is obtained, processed, and evaluated efficiently, there's many substantial opportunities at the level of treatment to pass through the effects of extracted observations to the professionals. Word processing software such as Microsoft Word, spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel as well as presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint are perhaps the most application tool presently to be used for office work. With all these central concepts it is essential to update one’s abilities. Windows File Explorer, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.), Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer) including Adobe Photoshop (to search files and folders).

3. Discuss three society-wide factors that will determine the extent to which computers are assimilated into medical practice.
   

   Answer:

   Three factors:

   • Computers is playing a prevalent role in today’s world whether as an ATM or microwave oven, or as telephone. It has been prevailing in our lives to a great extent. Many clinicians have learned computer for searching medical literature. As of now, their use is becoming more justified, therefore, this clinical software is becoming much demanding .
   • The second factor determines to possess a raise in the number of professionals that is being trained in order to emphasize upon resolving biomedical issues along with certain technical as well as engineering ones.
   • The third factor shows that the incorporation of computing technologies is being affected when used among healthcare settings as well as when the pressure is enhanced in controlling the medical expenditure.
4. Reread the future vision presented in Section 1.1. Describe the characteristics of an integrated environment for managing medical information. Discuss two ways in which such a system could change medical practice.
5. Do you believe that improving the technical quality of health care entails the risk of dehumanization? If so, is it worth the risk? Explain your reasoning

Week 2 Assignment

1. You check your pulse and discover that your heart rate is 100 beats per minute. Is this rate normal or abnormal? What additional information would you use in making this judgment? How does the context in which data are collected influence the interpretation of those data?

2. Given the imprecision of many medical terms, why do you think that serious instances of miscommunication among health care professionals are not more common? Why is greater standardization of terminology necessary if computers rather than humans are to manipulate patient data?

3. Based on the discussion of coding schemes for representing medical information, discuss three challenges you foresee in attempting to construct a standardized medical terminology to be used in hospitals, physicians’ offices, and research institutions throughout the United States.
   

   Answer:

   Extended Coded Software Uses-

   Research has found that use of information for other reasons can negatively impact coded collected data with a clear objective on payment. While many people who work inside the healthcare sector realize only programmed data as the origin of reimbursement determination, HIM experts have often comprehended the multitude important applications of data collected.

   Patient Safety Assessment-

   As just a clinical instrument, AHRQ established Patient Safety Indicators (PSIS) to focus on areas which system or procedure improvements might minimize avoidable accidents. Actually, PSI information can be used for security monitoring and sensitive internal investigation by numerous government agencies.

   Risk adjustment-

   Many researchers have been developing risk-adjustment methods and techniques and provide a reasonable assessment of data collected. Such risk management techniques are being used to promote a range of data collection activities by specific health care providers, government entities, and hospital organizations.

   Support to clinical decision-

   Patient information are used to trigger clinical warnings, notifications of preventive measures and serious disease, and also to assistance clinical decision making. The expanded use of health records in treatment has indeed strengthened the significance of the timeliness and quality of such results.

4. How would medical practice change if nonphysicians were to collect all medical data?
   

   Answer:

   Introduction of nonphysicians in the interpreting the medical data would definitely bring a change in serving the medical purposes. They vary between narrative, textual, to numerical data, signals registered, sketches, or even images. Narrative evidence constitutes a significant element of the knowledge that is collected in health care. For instance, the overview of the patient's clinical examination, such as the physician's answers to particular concerns, is generally collected orally and documented. Such reasons given were customarily scribbled by clinicians and afterwards positioned in the patient's health file. Progressively, even so, the storytelling descriptions are governed and then translated by typesetters that work with word processors to generate printable overviews for integration in health records. The selectivity concept implies a continuous decision-making mechanism that directs the collection and analysis of data. Health decision-maker experiments have also shown that data collection and data analysis approaches can be implemented in an incremental method known as the hypothetic deductive approach. Physicians relate to the collection of active theories as a diagnostic process for a physician; the treatment options require a range of potential conditions to be identified by the physician. Thus, the nonphysicians could make wrong interpretations to the data which subsequently would alter the treatment being provided to the client.

5. Consider what you know about the typical daily schedule of a busy clinician. What are the advantages of wireless devices, connected to the Internet, as tools for such clinicians? Can you think of disadvantages as well? Be sure to consider the safety and protection of information as well as workflow and clinical needs.

6. To decide whether a patient has a significant urinary tract infection, physicians commonly use a calculation of the number of bacterial organisms in a millilitre of the patient’s urine. Physicians generally assume that a patient has a urinary tract infection if there are at least 10,000 bacteria per millilitre. Although laboratories can provide such quantification with reasonable accuracy, it is obviously unrealistic for the physician explicitly to count large numbers of bacteria by examining a millilitre of urine under the microscope. As a result, one recent article offers the following guideline to physicians: “When interpreting . . . microscopy of . . . stained centrifuged urine, a threshold of one organism per field yields a 95 percent sensitivity and five organisms per field a 95 percent specificity for bacteriuria [bacteria in the urine] at a level of at least 10,000 organisms per ml.” (Senior Medical Review, 1987, p. 4)

1. Describe an experiment that would have allowed the researchers to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the microscopy.
2. How would you expect specificity to change as the number of bacteria per microscopic field increases from one to five.
3. How would you expect sensitivity to change as the number of bacteria per microscopic field increases from one to five.
4. Why does it take more organisms per microscopic field to obtain a specificity of 95 percent than it does to achieve a sensitivity of 95 percent.