By: Julia Aidan
Submitted: 2010-02-12 10:41:29 | Word Count: 488
Health information is a record of your health containing the detailed history, symptoms, examinations and test results. This record is maintained each time you visit your physician, health care facility or any other health care provider. This information is typically referred to as the patient/client medical record and serves as a data for diagnoses, treatment and plan for future care. The other significant aspects for which your health information record is utilized are:
- .Planning your treatment and care.
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- Communicating among health care professionals anxious in your case,
- Serves as a legal document detailing the treatment and care you received.
- Authentication of services actually provided and billed for payment by third party,
- It is imperative to educate professionals
- The personally de-identified data is used for medical research as well as for elevating the health of the region or nation by public health officials,
- De-identified data is vital for marketing and planning for business.
Apart from the above, understanding your health information record helps you to ensure its truth, whether your data is being accessed unauthorizedly and make informed decisions while authorizing disclosure.
It was reported in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine that almost 98,000 people died in any given year due to medical errors occurring in hospitals, and this prodded Patient Safety organizations to find industry wide solutions to avoidable medical errors. The result was Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), which emerged as a key component for such solutions. CPOE became an effective solution to problems occurring due to medical errors, by integrating the care process to reduce the chances of error. The two important features of CPOE systems are they support physicians to order electronically instead of handwritten or oral instructions and provide detailed information of patients by merging clinical information from several sources like pharmacy, laboratory and radiology.
CPOE safeguards the safety of the patoient. In manual system, clerks create errors while transcribing imaging orders from written charts, but with CPOE the physician enters the order honestly, eliminating clerical intervention and transcription errors. Further, for radiologist accuracy the physician is forced to give all the details in the computerized order entry system including the reason of examination, before it will accept the order; thereby helping the radiologist for finding diseases present or absent and improving the practice of medicine.
It is realized that CPOE cuts turn around time for x-rays and other radiology procedures by 43 percent, cuts medication turn around time by 64 percent and cut down turn around time for lab tests by 25 percent; apart from the evident benefit of eliminating drug errors associated with handwritten prescriptions. This hastens the treatment of the patient. Further, CPOE combined all patient orders, radiology studies, medications, special diets, lab studies, tests and consultations in a single technique.
Author Resource:-
For more details about the advantages of health information exchange check out the Half Penny website online; and also seeSEO services group ClickResponse.