Patient care comes under the focus of many disciplines like medicine, pharmaceuticals, nutrition science, and nursing. Although the objective and aim of all the disciplines may overlap, each one of them has its emphasis and method of delivery. In real-life, practitioners from all of these fields work hand in hand to provide the appropriate patient care for the patient. Adding collaborations between these already complex disciplines adds another level of complexity. In this field, a patient’s health depends on practitioners making the right decisions at the right time. Thus, they depend on the system. Patient care systems are computer-based programs that help automate the entire clinical workflow.  Therefore, a critical tool in health care.

In this article, we would take a deeper look into the system and recognize the trends and challenges of the patient care systems.

A brief history of patient information management systems in health care

The first-ever prototype to transfer the medical records to an electronic format known as Electronic Medical records were developed in the 1960s.  Although the system got an initial acceptance by the primary and large scale healthcare providers, the diffusion of these systems was rather slow for the next two decades. It was in the 1990s when the Institute of Medicine called for the adoption of EMRs as a necessary step in revolutionizing healthcare delivery towards information technology towards improvement in the information management sector. This turn, formed as a point of inflexion in the healthcare industries and led to the actions in the private and public sector to lay the necessary ground for the large scale adaptation of the electronically operated information management systems. This system later came into existence by the name of National Health Information Infrastructure.

Trends and Challenges of Patient Information Management

As the field keeps growing, huge investments are being made to develop new programs for improved patient care experience and efficiency of healthcare organizations. Managing data is a challenging task. To succeed and keep pace with the constantly evolving industry and the growing need of healthcare, the new Healthcare Information Management developers to update themselves with the changes that are happening in the field, including the latest developments and challenges.

The following are the recent trends in the HIM that a healthcare professional should be updated with.

Privacy and Security

With recent advances in healthcare technology, the amount of information being stored online in cloud systems is ever increasing. While this provides several benefits, it also makes the system and data in it vulnerable to attacks from varied online threats such as hackers, server breakdowns and data-corruption.

In a report generated by Trap Security, cyberattacks against healthcare institutions went up by 63 per cent in 2016 as compared to previous years. This trend is expected to continue further until we come up with a robust solution to deal with it.

What lays at the heart of the problem is lack of ability Information management workers to detect and remediate on system ransomware attacks. In an answer to these problems, Strategies and new technologies are emerging to ensure the privacy of data in the field. This is of much importance when it comes to building trust with the patient. The patient record is sensitive data, and it is unacceptable for patients to have their information online.

Information Governance

Information governance deals with implementing policies, controls and structures to ensure appropriate handling of data and its assets. It is one of the most significant challenges in Patient Care Systems.

As technology is advancing, it is enabling the creation and retention of data at an expedited rate. Thus beyond the needs to harness and analyze data, there is also a need to regulate the flow of it. Disruption of data flow can trigger untimely system collapse and jeopardize the health of patients across the network.

Data Analytics

Amidst the recent trends in the information management industry, Data Analytics is an emerging trend and technology that has the potential to bring drastic changes to the field. Healthcare industry has seen a massive increase in the amount of data being collected from patient information management systems.  But raw data is of very little use until it is filtered, sorted and classified to derive actionable knowledge out of it.

Data Analytics is facilitating HIM professionals to address and resolve different challenges in healthcare to provide high-quality care to patients. Data analytics is helping professionals to make better decisions, predict outcomes and manage inventory. Data backed decisions are more accurate and can be reliable under high-risk situations. 

Conclusion

The need for health care is ever-increasing. It is difficult for hospitals and medical staff to keep up with the need.  A large demand for health care services gives birth to copious amounts of information to be managed by staff and numerous information management systems. Computerized information management systems are an imperative need for the healthcare industry today. Despite a few challenges, Patient Care systems continue to advance further and function as a backbone of the Health Care Network, enabling different individuals and teams to make the right decisions at the right time.