Health Information Technology Analysis

Healthcare Information Technology Advances as Patients take charge of
Their Health.

The accessibility of health information can make the difference between a patient receiving care and receiving excellent care. The use of technology has become more widely adopted over the years, and has made health information more readily available. Providers have been able to utilize new technologies to create a better system for patient care. This new system has grown to allow patients to take control of their health. In order to see the way technology has evolved to provide better care, we must first look at its origin. Before technology, medical records were created by hand and kept within the facility they originated in (Wilson,2009). There was no way …show more content…
The adoption of eHealth technologies has brought forth the idea of telemedicine, in order to meet the needs of patients with chronic diseases. Telemedicine is also useful to patients that require specialist care, but live in an area that is lacking the type of consultation they need (Cannon, 2014). Lastly, it will assist in the care of elderly who wish to stay in their home. Finet et al. describes telemedicine as a collaborative effort between eHealth systems: The system in which the patient monitors their care (e.g. health portals, wearable technology, e-journals), the system that transfers data from a patient’s home to the physician (e.g. communicating box transferring results from all equipment), and the data processing system located within a hospital or care facility (e.g web portals) (2015). Telemedicine integrated multiple eHealth technologies into one dynamic system. It has previously been used in hospitals as a way to obtain consultations from remote physicians; for example, the use of telestroke for collaboration between remote neurologists and the emergency department (Campion, 2016). Telehealth has not yet reached its full potential, but is already being used to improve patient care. Patients are already using wearable or implanted devices that record and automatically report health information (Campion, 2016). Other recent innovations include, the creation of a box that allows multiple health monitors to synch via Bluetooth and automatically send joint results (Campion, 2016). While these are constructive intelligent technologies, they are not completed enough to utilize telemedicine the way that we expect to in the future. While telemedicine has already impacted hospitals and patients with chronic illness, it is excepted to reach a much broader range. In the future, it will impact the ability for

Show More