Medical Informatics For Healthcare Quality Improvement

Abstract

An environment that is favourable to using information technology to improve healthcare service delivery has been created by the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), the improved accessibility of EHR data, improvements in analytical techniques, and changes to healthcare payment systems.  The EHR systems that providers use, the quality metrics developed by different organizations, and the inconsistent ways in which these metrics are applied by multiple organizations all demonstrate the lack of uniformity.  The coordination and governance of systematic methods to utilize health information systems and associated data in order to enhance clinical effectiveness are in dire need. Based on this definition, quality informatics is the field that applies medical data derived from healthcare information systems to enhance clinical effectiveness. The gathering of reliable healthcare quality information, analysis, and use of findings to guide quality improvement efforts constitute the backbone of quality informatics, a clinical informatics sub-discipline, which generally examines the organization and use of information to enhance healthcare provision.