What Data Is Used From Health Informatics To Make Decisions

Defining the Basics of Health Informatics for HIM Professionals - Retired

All data are not created equal and technology implementation solitary is not enough to improve the healthcare provided to patients. Providers and organizations must be able to distinguish between an abundance of data, meaningful data, and integration of data. Healthcare organizations are challenged to meet these data dilemmas in their daily practices and workflow, where new technologies and handling modalities are changing and evolving at a rapid rate.

The process of organizing, storing, integrating, and retrieving medical and patient information has traditionally been managed through paper-based systems. The dilemma is that paper-based systems accept evolved into disparate and proprietary systems with limited functionality. Healthcare has done a proficient chore capturing data, but the unintended consequence is that the proliferation of electronic data and the expanded use of electronic health records (EHRs) take vastly increased the volume of available health information and the speed at which it is communicated. The human capacity to assimilate, translate, and human action on such data in an efficient manner, however, has not evolved as apace. The need for health informatics has never been greater. This practice brief provides an overview of health computer science nuts and includes a glossary of terms that are unremarkably associated with the field.

Bones Conceptual Framework of Health Informatics

Defining Health Informatics

Wellness informatics can be defined in ii different ways:

A scientific subject field that is concerned with the cognitive, information-processing, and communication tasks of healthcare practice, teaching, and inquiry, including the information science and technology to support these tasks^ane
A field of information science concerned with the management of all aspects of health information and information through the application of computers and estimator technology²

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has divers clinical information science equally the application of computer science and information technology to deliver healthcare services.³ It includes a broad range of topics from clinical documentation to provider order entry systems and from system design to organisation implementation and adoption bug.⁴ The field of information science includes a number of related areas such equally translational bioinformatics, clinical enquiry informatics, consumer health informatics, and public wellness informatics.^five

Each subject field-specific area—such equally nursing or chemist's—within the overall sphere of information science in healthcare has specific needs. Informatics in nursing, for case, focuses on bug such equally tracking and documenting nursing care by using it.

Having too much data may be worse than not having enough when it comes to making strategic healthcare decisions. Health information science enables health information management professionals to get together and clarify large amounts of data into useful data and is poised for a period of rapid growth and expansion every bit the healthcare manufacture continues to evolve and produce an increasing amount of yet-unharnessed data ability. A multitude of external forces and trends such as force per unit area to comprise ascension healthcare costs, expansion of information exchange, tracking and reporting meaningful utilize of EHR criteria, and reduction of medical errors all call for the awarding of informatics.

Potential Career Progression for a Health Information science Professional

Health information science professionals can provide organizations and providers with the experience and knowledge required to pull meaningful information from a multitude of sources. These professionals are importantly responsible for gathering and analyzing patient health details and compiling them for review by clinical care providers. In addition, the health informatics professional tin can ensure that the correct information is collected and presented in a readable format. This graphic shows what degrees HIM professionals need to work in various areas of the profession, including computer science.

Associate Degree

Registered Health Information Technician
Medical Transcriptionist
Information Entry Specialist

Available Degree

Registered Health Data Administrator
Computer science Nurse Specialist
System Data Analyst

Advanced Degree

Master Degree or Certificate in Biomedical Information science
Master Degree in Health Informatics
Certified Health Data Analyst (CHDA) Credential
Epidemiologist
Statistician
Informaticist

Information science Helps Harness the Power of Information for Healthcare Improvement

Health informatics is an interdisciplinary subject that utilizes technology to organize, analyze, manage, and use information to ameliorate healthcare. Its master goals are to develop standards and clinical intendance guidelines that enhance electronic health records by facilitating information management.

Health informatics as a discipline traces its roots back to the 1940s in Europe, but information technology did not begin to accept root in the The states until the mid 1970s. Today, many organizations recognize informatics equally an important field in medicine and health sciences.

Applied health informatics has the potential for extensive benefits for the healthcare industry, from decreasing access wait times to reducing duplication of tests. Public health informatics will become increasingly important to the direction of public and population health. More data will be available for analysis with the increment of electronically generated and stored information.

Glossary of Terms Relevant to Health Information science

Agency for Healthcare Inquiry and Quality (AHRQ)

The co-operative of the United States Public Wellness Service that supports general health enquiry and distributes inquiry findings and treatment guidelines with the goal of improving the quality, appropriateness, and effectiveness of healthcare services.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)

The purposes of this human action include:

Preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery.
Assist those almost impacted by the recession.
Provide investments needed to increment economic efficiency past spurring technological advances in science and wellness.
Invest in transportation, ecology protection, and other infrastructures that will provide long-term economic benefits.
Stabilize state and local government budgets in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.

Analysis

Review of the health tape for proper documentation and adherence to regulatory and accreditation standards.

Buoy Customs Cooperative Agreement Programme

This program demonstrates how health Information technology investments and meaningful use of EHRs advance the vision of patient-centered intendance, while achieving the three-part aim of better health, better intendance, and lower cost. The Function of the National Coordinator for Health Information technology (ONC) is providing $250 meg over three years to 17 selected communities throughout the United States that take already made inroads in the development of secure, individual, and authentic systems of EHR adoption and health information commutation.⁷

Biomedical Informatics

A bailiwick concerned with the wide range of issues in the direction and use of biomedical information, including biomedical computing and the written report of the nature of biomedical information itself. Formerly called medical informatics, the new name is intended to analyze that the domain encompasses biological and biomolecular informatics equally well as clinical, imaging, and public health computer science.⁸ Biomedical informatics is the interdisciplinary field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical information, information, and knowledge for scientific research, problem solving, and decision making, motivated by efforts to meliorate human being health.⁹ It'due south the employ of information technology for assimilating, gathering, organizing, analyzing, and presenting healthcare-related data to produce information for conclusion support to improve quality of intendance, decrease costs, enhance patient safety, and increase interoperability. Health information technology is the tool and information is the effect.

Biomedical Research

The procedure of systematically investigating subjects related to the functioning of the human body.

Centers for Disease Command and Prevention (CDC)

A federal agency defended to protecting health and promoting quality of life through the prevention and command of disease, injury, and disability. Committed to programs that reduce the health and economic consequences of the leading causes of death and disability, thereby ensuring a long, productive, and salubrious life for all people.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency responsible for Medicare and parts of Medicaid. Historically, CMS has maintained the UB-92 institutional electronic media claims (EMC) format specifications, the professional EMC NSF specifications, and specifications for various certifications and authorizations used by the Medicare and Medicaid programs. CMS is responsible for the oversight of HIPAA administrative simplification transaction and lawmaking sets, health identifiers, and security standards. CMS also maintains the HCPCS medical lawmaking set and the Medicare Remittance Communication Remark Codes administrative code set.

Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT)

An independent voluntary individual-sector initiative organized as a limited liability corporation that has been awarded a contract by HHS to develop, create prototypes for, and evaluate the certification criteria and inspection process for electronic health tape (EHR) products.

Certified Health Data Analyst (CHDA)

AHIMA credential awarded to individuals who have demonstrated skills and expertise in health data analysis.

Certified in Healthcare Privacy and Security (CHPS)

AHIMA credential that recognizes advanced competency in designing, implementing, and administering comprehensive privacy and security protection programs in all types of healthcare organizations. Requires successful completion of the CHPS exam sponsored by AHIMA.

Clinical Analytics

The process of gathering and examining data in social club to aid gain greater insight about patients.

Clinical Data Analytics

The process by which health information is captured, reviewed, and used to mensurate quality.

Clinical Decision Support

The process in which individual data elements are represented in the estimator by a special code to be used in making comparisons, trending results, and supplying clinical reminders and alerts.

Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

A Health Level Seven (HL7) XML-based document markup standard for the electronic exchange model for clinical documents (such equally discharge summaries and progress notes). The implementation guide contains a library of CDA templates, incorporating and harmonizing previous efforts from HL7, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, and Health Information technology Standards Console (HITSP). It includes all required CDA templates for phase 1 of the "meaningful use" EHR Incentive Program and HITECH concluding rule. It is usually referred to as Consolidate CDA or C-CDA.

Clinical Documentation Comeback (CDI)

The process an system undertakes that will better clinical specificity and documentation that will allow coders to assign more concise illness nomenclature codes.

Clinical Documentation Improvement Programme

A programme in which specialists concurrently review health records for incomplete documentation, prompting clinical staff to clarify ambiguity which allows coders to assign more concise disease classification codes.

Clinical Document Comeback Practitioner (CDIP)

AHIMA credential awarded to individuals who take accomplished specialized skills in clinical documentation comeback.

Clinical Terminology

A set up of standardized terms and their synonyms that record patient findings, circumstances, events, and interventions with sufficient detail to back up clinical care, conclusion support, outcomes research, and quality improvement.

Committee on Accreditation of Wellness Informatics and Data Management Teaching (CAHIIM)

An independent accrediting organisation whose mission is to serve the public interest by establishing and enforcing quality accreditation standards for health informatics and wellness information management educational programs.

Committee on Certification for Health Informatics and Information Direction (CCHIIM)

An independent body inside AHIMA that establishes and enforces standards for the certification and certification maintenance of health informatics and data management professionals.

Comparative Effectiveness Enquiry (CER)

Research that generates and synthesizes testify that compares the benefits and harms of alternative methods to prevent, diagnose, care for, and monitor a clinical condition or to improve the delivery of care.

Computer-Assisted Coding (CAC)

The process of extracting and translating dictated and then transcribed gratuitous-text information (or dictated so computer-generated discrete information) into ICD-9-CM and CPT evaluation and management codes for billing and coding purposes.

Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE)

Electronic prescribing systems that allow physicians to write prescriptions and transmit them electronically. These systems usually contain error prevention software that provides the user with prompts that warn against the possibility of drug interaction, allergy, overdose, and other relevant information.

Covered Entity (CE)

As amended past HITECH, a covered entity may exist defined every bit a health plan, a healthcare clearinghouse, or a healthcare provider who transmits any wellness information in electronic course in connectedness with a transaction covered by HITECH.

Information Analytics

The science of examining raw data with the purpose of drawing conclusions about that data. This includes data mining, machine language, evolution of models, and statistical measurements. Analytics tin exist descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive.

Data Dictionary

A descriptive list of the names, definitions, and attributes of data elements to be collected in an data system or database whose purpose is to standardize definitions and ensure consistent use.

Data Governance

The overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data employed in an organization or enterprise.9

Information Mapping

Data mapping allows for connections between 2 systems. This connection allows for data initially captured for ane purpose to be translated and used for another purpose. Ane organization in a map is identified as the source while the other is the target. It is a procedure by which ii distinct data models are created and a link betwixt these models is divers. This process is used in data warehousing by which different data models are linked to each other using a divers set of methods to characterize the data in a specific definition. This definition tin be whatsoever atomic unit, such as a unit of metadata or any other semantic. This data linking follows a set of standards, which depends on the domain value of the data model used. Data mapping serves every bit the initial pace in information integration.

Data Mining

The procedure of extracting and analyzing large volumes of data from a database for the purpose of identifying subconscious and sometimes subtle relationships or patterns and using those relationships to predict behaviors.

Data Stewardship

The responsibilities and accountabilities associated with managing, collecting, viewing, storing, sharing, disclosing, or otherwise making use of personal health information.

Decision Support Arrangement (DSS)

A figurer-based organization that gathers information from a diverseness of sources and assists in providing construction to the data by using various analytical models and visual tools in order to facilitate and improve the ultimate consequence in decision making tasks associated with non-routine and non-repetitive problems.

Descriptive Statistics

A set of statistical techniques used to describe data such every bit means, frequency distributions, and standard deviations; statistical information that describes the characteristics of a specified grouping or a population.

Enterprise Information Direction (EIM)

Ensuring the value of information avails, requiring an organization-wide perspective of data management functions, calls for explicit structures, policies, processes, technology, and controls. EIM is the infrastructure and processes in identify to ensure data is trustworthy and actionable.

Health Informatics

Scientific subject that is concerned with the cognitive, data-processing, and advice tasks of healthcare practice, education, and inquiry, including the computer science and technology to support these tasks.

Health Informatics and Information Management (HIIM)

Refers to the individuals responsible for the management of healthcare data and information in newspaper or electronic form and control the collection, access, use, substitution, and protection of the information through the awarding of wellness it.

Wellness Data Technology

A term that encompasses the technical roles that procedure health information and records, such as classification, abstracting, and retrieval.¹⁰ Under HITECH, health Information technology is defined equally hardware, software, integrated technologies or related licenses, intellectual property, upgrades, or packaged solutions sold as services that are designed for, or support the use by, healthcare entities or patients for the electronic creation, maintenance, access, or exchange of wellness information.

Healthcare Cost and Utilization Projection (HCUP)

A family unit of databases and related software tools and products developed through a federal-state-industry partnership and sponsored past AHRQ. HCUP databases are derived from authoritative data and contain come across-level, clinical, and nonclinical data including all listed diagnoses and procedures, discharge status, patient demographics, and charges for all patients, regardless of payer, outset in 1988.

Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS)

A set of standard operation measures that tin requite an individual information about the quality of a health plan. I tin can find out nearly the quality of care, access, cost, and other measures to compared managed intendance plans. CMS collects HEDIS data for Medicare plans.

Informatics

A subject that focuses on the use of technology to ameliorate admission to, and utilization of, information.

Information Governance (IG)

The accountability framework and conclusion rights to achieve enterprise information management (EIM). IG is the responsibleness of executive leadership for developing and driving the IG strategy throughout the organization. IG encompasses both data governance and information technology governance.

Data Applied science Governance (ITG)

Led by the chief information officeholder (CIO), the procedure to ensure the effective evaluation, selection, prioritization, and funding of competing It investments. ITG oversees the implementation of these investments and extracts business benefits.^xi

International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM)

The coding nomenclature system that will replace ICD-9-CM, Volumes 1 and ii, on October 1, 2015. ICD-10-CM is the United states' clinical modification of the Globe Health Organization's ICD-x. ICD-10-CM has a full of 21 chapters and contains significantly more than codes than ICD-ix-CM, providing the ability to code with a greater level of specificity.

International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS)

The coding classification system that will replace ICD-9-CM, Volume 3, on October ane, 2015. ICD-x-PCS has 16 sections and contains significantly more process codes than ICD-9-CM, providing the ability to code procedures with a greater level of specificity.

Interoperability

The adequacy of different information systems and software applications to communicate and exchange data.

Machine Learning

An surface area of computer scientific discipline that studies algorithms and computer programs that meliorate employee functioning on some task by exposure to preparation or learning experience.

Medical Informatics

A field of data science concerned with the management of data and information used to diagnose, treat, cure, and prevent disease through the application of computers and computer technologies.¹²

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

A technology that converts human language (structured or unstructured) into data that tin can exist translated and then manipulated past computer systems; a branch of artificial intelligence.

Office of the National Coordinator for Health Data Technology (ONC)

The principle federal entity charged with coordination of nationwide efforts to implement and use the almost avant-garde health information engineering science and the electronic exchange of health information. The position of the National Coordinator was created in 2004, through an Executive Order, and legislatively mandated in the HITECH Act of 2009.

Predictive Modeling

A process used to identify patterns that can be used to predict the odds of a particular consequence based on the observed data.

Semantic Interoperability

Mutual agreement of the pregnant of information exchanged between data systems.

Telehealth

A telecommunications system that links healthcare organizations and patients from various geographic locations and transmits text and images for medical consultation and handling.

Profitable with the Triple Aim

In 2006 the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) received a report from the Southern California Evidenced-based Practice Center stating that approximately 50 percent of the nation's healthcare costs were wasted on inefficient processes. Health informatics can aid with improving the patient experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare—three goals also known every bit the "Triple Aim."^{half dozen}

Equally a multidisciplinary field, gathering data from multiple clinical, financial, and administrative systems is important to be able to sort through volumes of data for wellness intelligence purposes. Some other advantages of health informatics are the power to improve EHR functionality, improve information exchange that follows the patient through the continuum of intendance, and analyze trends from a larger population mass.

Management of Health Data Continues to Pose Challenges

The modern healthcare industry struggles to manage data. In the quest for data, EHRs take been created to import large amounts of data, storing every keystroke and data point. In fact, in today's era of Big Data, frivolous, meaningless, and unstructured information is collected and stored next to meaningful information. While computers and difficult drives are exceptional at sorting through mounds of structured data, humans are not. Computers cannot distinguish good data from bad data and unstructured information is more difficult to parse. Human being interaction is required to interpret the data. It is essential to residual usability with functionality.

In addition, healthcare professionals lack background and agreement of information science. This fact further complicates the copious amounts of data entered without the appreciation for the potential that data could yield.

Disquisitional challenges in health informatics are evolving today in the Usa. Challenges include inadequate staffing resources, lack of alignment, abstract financial incentives, and lack of organization integration and interoperability. These challenges must be overcome in order to successfully accomplish healthcare reform and patient safety initiatives, and to demonstrate improved quality of care with reduced toll in the United States.

Notes

AHIMA. Pocket Glossary of Health Information Management and Technology, Fourth Edition. Chicago, IL: AHIMA Printing, 2014.
Fenton, Susan and Sue Biedermann. Introduction to Healthcare Informatics. Chicago, IL: AHIMA Press, 2014.
American Medical Informatics Association. "Clinical Informatics." http://www.amia.org/applications-informatics/clinical-informatics.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Berwick, Donald M. et al. "The Triple Aim: Care, Wellness, and Cost." Health Diplomacy 27, no. 3 (May 2008): 759-769. http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/27/iii/759.abstract.
Office of the National Coordinator for Health It. "Beacon Customs Plan." HealthIT.gov. http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/beacon-community-plan.
Shortliffe, East. et al. Biomedical Computer science: Reckoner Applications in Health Intendance and Biomedicine. New York, NY: Springer, 2006.
Warner, Diana. "IG 101: What is Information Governance?" Periodical of AHIMA website. December four, 2013. http://journal.ahima.org/2013/12/04/ig-101-what-is-information-governance/.
LaTour, Kathleen 1000. et al. Wellness Information Management Concepts, Principles, and Exercise. Chicago, IL: AHIMA Press, 2010.
Gartner. "Information technology Governance (ITG)." 2013. http://www.gartner.com/information technology-glossary/it-governance/.
LaTour, Kathleen Grand. et al. Wellness Information Management Concepts, Principles, and Exercise.

References

Adler-Milstein, Julia and David West. Bates. "Paperless healthcare: Progress and challenges of an It-enabled healthcare system." Concern Horizons 53, no. 2 (2010): 119-103.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. "Medical Informatics for Better and Safer Health Care." Research in Action 6 (June 2002). http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/informatic/information science/index.html.

AHIMA. "Information Governance Glossary." 2014. http://www.ahima.org/topics/infogovernance.

HIMSS. "2012 HIMSS Leadership Survey." 2012. www.himss.org.

Denton, David Yard. "Doctors Are Drowning In Data." Information Week. Apr ane, 2014. http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-health-records/doctors-are-drowning-in-information/d/d-id/1141595.

Hornby, Sydney. "The Advantages of Using Wellness Informatics." Livestrong.com. July 25, 2010. http://www.livestrong.com/article/184044-the-advantages-of-using-health-computer science/.

Jacobs, Alexis. "Critical challenges in Health computer science?" Health Technology Trends. March 27, 2013. http://www.healthtechtrends.com/patient/disquisitional-challenges-in-health-informatics.

Prepared by

Julie A. Dooling, RHIA, CHDA
Kim Osborne, RHIA, PMP
Lou Ann Wiedemann, MS, RHIA, CDIP, CHDA, CPEHR, FAHIMA

Acknowledgements

Cecilia Backman, MBA, RHIA, CPHQ, FHIMSS
Linda Bailey-Woods, RHIA, CPHIMS
Jill S. Clark, MBA, RHIA, CHDA, FAHIMA
Angela Dinh Rose, MHA, RHIA, CHPS, FAHIMA
Marsha Dolan, MBA, RHIA, FAHIMA
Katherine Downing, MA, RHIA, CHPS, PMP
Leah A. Grebner, PhD, RHIA, CCS, FAHIMA
Judi Hofman, BCRT, CHPS, CAP, CHP, CHSS
Beth Just, MBA, RHIA, FAHIMA
Lesley Kadlec, MA, RHIA
Susan Lucci, RHIA, CHPS, CHDS, AHDI-F
Stephanie Luthi-Terry, MA, RHIA, FAHIMA
Rosann M. O'Dell, D.H.Sc., MS, RHIA, CDIP
Cindy C. Parman, CPC, CPC-H, RCC
Kathleen Paterson, MS, RHIA, CCS
Harry B. Rhodes, MBA, RHIA, CHPS, CDIP, CPHIMS, FAHIMA
Dan Rode, MBA, CHPS, FHFMA, FAHIMA
Bryanna Schoeffel, RHIA
Diana Warner, MS, RHIA, CHPS, FAHIMA
Traci Waugh, RHIA, CHPS, CHC

Article commendation:
AHIMA Work Group. "Defining the Nuts of Wellness Information science for HIM Professionals - Retired" Periodical of AHIMA 85, no.9 (September 2014): 60-66.