South Carolina prepares: pandemic influenza.
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This article looks at how health care IT can save hospitals and health services valuable funding and how these saving compare to the costs involved. The chief barriers to success and possible solutions to these difficulties are outlined. The author also points to the need for government intervention in implementing health care IT on a board scale.
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In today's global community the ability to prepare for a disease outbreak in order to mitigate the public health, social, and economic impacts on a community depends upon data to support the decision and response process. Data can come from a variety of sources. These sources not only include the medical and health care community, but also geographic, demographic, and socio-economic data. The ability to capture and utilize the data effectively from these types of data sources can mean the difference between a manageable disease outbreak that represents little or no threat to a community and one that causes a significant social and economic impact. As the health profession expands the applied use of information technology within the medical and health care communities, opportunities are created to expand the use of new data sources to support information based decisions. Information that can be used to provide early warning for disease outbreaks both naturally occurring or through a bioterrorist event; information that can be used to plan, analyze and respond to a disease event; information that can support a community's preparedness activities in order to minimize a public health event. This chapter illustrates how applied compunetics can be used to support health care as the public health professional responds to, and manages, naturally occurring diseases as well as emerging new disease threats. An electronic health environment (EHE) vision is presented that capitalizes on the use of a variety of environmental, medical, and health care data to support disease early warning, reporting, case and outbreak management and community preparedness.
EHR systems have evolved from management of medical and patient records to the management of comprehensive health records including information about any observed health states e.g., social, economic and environmental conditions; and process such as public health surveillance, health promotion, prevention, education, etc. The paper discusses the analysis and design of Electronic Public Health Records (EPHR) according to the advanced state of knowledge in methodologies, models, techniques and tools for the specification of EPHR systems. A formal component-based architectural approach, based on internationally agreed terminologies, healthcare standards and software engineering de facto standards is presented.
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The wider use of telematics in public health and patient care will be a very important strategy for Member States, and one that can help bring expert knowledge to new areas and institutions in a cost-effective and rapid manner. However, such a strategy should take into account a number of elements that are given below. Health telematics systems and services should be dictated by health need s and by clinical and public health standards, not be technology-driven. The values and principles of Health for All (HFA), notably equity, sustainability, participation and accountability, should apply fully to the development of health telematics. Health telematics requires new skills from the relevant decision-makers , operators and users, calling for a mix of participatory education, skills training, continuing professional education and lifelong learning. Given the fast rate of technological obsolescence and changing price-performance ratios, countries will benefit from closer collaboration on the development of technological standards, compatibility, open architecture, competitive prices and pilot applications. Managing health information developments in an effective and rational way at the level of the European Region will require the major organizations active in this field to enter into more formal agreements of cooperation than is the case today; most importantly, this will involve World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commission and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
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OBJECTIVE: To obtain an overview of study designs and study methods used in research evaluating IT in health care, to present a list of quality criteria by which all kinds of reported evaluation studies on IT systems in health care can be assessed, and to assess the quality of reported evaluation studies on IT in health care and its development over time (1982-2005). METHODS: A generic 10-item list of quality indicators was developed based on existing literature on quality of medical and medical informatics publications. It is applicable to all kind of IT evaluation papers and not restricted to randomized controlled trials. One hundred and twenty explanatory papers evaluating the effects of an IT system in health care published between 1982 and 2005 were randomly selected from PubMed, the study designs and study methods were extracted, and the quality indicators were used to assess the quality of each paper by two independent raters. RESULTS: The inter-rater variability of scoring the 10 quality indicators as assessed by a pre-test with nine papers was good (K=0.87). There was a trend towards more multi-centre studies and authors coming more frequently from various departments. About 70% of the studies used a design other than a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Forty percent of the studies combined at least two different data acquisition methods. The quality of IT evaluation papers, as defined by the quality indicators, was only slightly improving in time (Spearman correlation coefficient [rs]=0.19). The quality of RCTs publications was significantly higher than the quality of non-RCT studies (p<0.001). CONCLUSION: The continuous and dominant number of non-RCT studies reflects the various approaches applicable to evaluate IT systems in health care. Despite the increasing discussion on evidence-based health informatics, the quality of published evaluation studies on IT interventions in health care is still insufficient in some aspects. Journal editors and referees should take care that reports of evaluation on IT systems contain all aspects needed for a sufficient understanding and reproducibility of a paper. Publication guidelines should be developed to support more complete and better publications of IT evaluation papers.
Public health agencies are in the early stages of building an electronic infrastructure that will link them to each other and eventually to the "information superhighway." Emphasis in planning and development is on data systems and the information and training services that can enhance essential public health services. This article argues for a larger vision of the potential of electronic networks for public health. It discusses the health and other challenges facing public health, the limitations of conventional efforts, and the emerging consensus on public health core functions. Finally, it examines current and potential uses of information technology. The article concludes by proposing that the public health community should develop a collaborative and inclusive vision of public health in an electronic world and provide guidance and support for agency implementation to ensure a stronger system that can meet the health and health equity challenges ahead.
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The phenomenon of publication bias has probably existed since results of scientific research are being published. Positive and/or statistically significant results seem more likely to be published than negative and/or insignificant results. However, it is unclear if there is a remarkable impact of publication bias in medical informatics evaluation literature and how aware researchers are of its effect. We conducted a small-scale study in order to find out what the ratio of papers describing positive results vs. negative results is, tried to find enough studies to a certain subject to carry out a meta-analysis and assess publication bias by statistical methods, and finally examined reviews and meta-analyses for their results and their quality. A random sample of 86 studies showed a remarkably high percentage of descriptions of positive results (69.8%). 19 (36.6%) of the analyzed 54 reviews and meta-analyses came to a positive conclusion with regard to the overall effect of the analyzed system, 32 (62.5%) were inconclusive, and only one review came to a negative conclusion. Quantitative assessment of publication bias for health informatics studies was found difficult due to the low number of comparable studies. Although there is no clear evidence for a great impact of publication bias in medical informatics evaluation literature, further research should carried out.
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Health Informatics (HI) is a dynamic discipline based on the medical sciences, information sciences, and cognitive sciences. Its domain can broadly be defined as medical information management. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of this domain, discuss the current "state of the art," and indicate the likely growth areas for health informatics. The sources of information used in this paper are selected publications from the literature of Health Informatics, HI 5300: Introduction to Health Informatics, which is a course from the Department of Health Informatics at the University of Texas Houston Health Sciences Center, and the author's personal experience in practicing telemedicine and implementing an electronic medical record at the NASA-Johnson Space Center. The conclusion is that the direction of Health Informatics is in the direction of data management, transfer, and representation via electronic medical records and the Internet.
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