NR 360
NR 360 Unit 6 Discussion: Informatics and the Development of Standards
NR 360 Unit 6 Discussion.
NR 360 Unit 6
NR 360 Unit 6 Discussion:
... [Show More] Informatics and the Development of Standards
Discuss the roles of federal, state, and local public health agencies in the development of standards for informatics in healthcare.
ANSWER
Data and communication in healthcare are essential to define our roles and responsibilities, educate us on better ways to implement safer patient care strategies, and guide us in the work we do each day. Informatics serves other facets of public health including emergency response, environmental health, nursing and administration. Governments at every level—federal, tribal, state, and local—play important roles in protecting, preserving, and promoting the public’s health and safety (Gostin, 2000, 2002). In the United States, the government’s responsibility for the health of its citizens stems, in part, from the nature of democracy itself. Several laws are out there to protect privacy of the patients and federal, state and local public health play important roles in the development of standards for informatics.
Role of federal in the development of standards for informatics in healthcare:
· The federal government acts in six main areas related to population health: (1) policy making, (2) financing, (3) public health protection, (4) collecting and disseminating information about U.S. health and health care delivery systems, (5) capacity building for population health, and (6) direct management of services (Boufford and Lee, 2001). For most of its history, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted the federal government broad powers under the Constitution to protect the public’s health and safety. Under the power to “regulate Commerce . . . among several states” and other constitutional powers, the federal government acts in areas such as environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and food and drug purity (Gostin, 2000). The federal government may set conditions on the expenditure of federal funds (e.g., require adoption of a minimum age of 21 for legal consumption of alcoholic beverages to receive Federal-Aid Highway.
· Improving Market Functioning in Health Information Technology: - The federal government could improve the functioning of HIT markets by helping to create incentives for providers to improve their health care performance, for example, by facilitating or requiring the collection and release of performance data. Initiatives of this nature are already under way in the Medicare program. Another option is to financially reward good performance through pay-for-performance programs, with which Medicare is also experimenting.
· Catalyzing Collective Action for Information Exchange: - The federal government can try to persuade private developers of HIT to develop and sell products that work together and enable efficient exchange of information within and across health care markets, states, and national boundaries. As a purchaser, the government can require the use of common definitions and protocols by providers and the HIT industry as a condition of doing business with the federal government.
Role of state in the development of standards for informatics in healthcare:
Improving healthcare quality has been an ongoing challenge in the United States, the state roles in the development of standards for informatics in healthcare would be.
States and their local subdivisions retain the primary responsibility for health under the U.S. Constitution: -
• To fulfill this responsibility, state and local public health authorities engage in a variety of activities, including monitoring the burden of injury and disease in the population through surveillance systems; identifying individuals and groups that have conditions of public health importance with testing, reporting, and partner notification; providing a broad array of prevention services such as counseling and education; and helping assure access to high-quality health care services for poor and vulnerable populations.
• State and local governments also engage in a broad array of regulatory activities. They seek to ensure that businesses conduct themselves in ways that are safe and sanitary (through the institution of measures such as inspections, licenses, and nuisance abatements) and that individuals do not engage in unduly risky behavior or pose a danger to others (through the provision of services such as vaccinations, directly observed therapy, and isolation), and they oversee the quality of health care provided in the public and private sectors.
Role for local public health agencies in the development of standards for informatics in health care:
The informatics perspective can provide insights and opportunities to improve each of the seven ongoing elements of any local public health. This will include:
· Planning and system design – Identifying information and sources that best address a surveillance goal; identifying who will access information, by what methods and under what conditions; and improving analysis or action by improving the surveillance system interaction with other information systems.
· Data collection – Identifying potential bias associated with different collection methods (e.g., telephone use or cultural attitudes toward technology); identifying appropriate use of structured data compared with free text, most useful vocabulary, and data standards; and recommending technologies (e.g., global positioning systems and radio-frequency identification) to support easier, faster, and higher-quality data entry in the field.
· Data management and collation – Identifying ways to share data across different computing/technology platforms; linking new data with data from legacy systems; and identifying and remedying data-quality problems while ensuring data privacy and security.
· Analysis – Identifying appropriate statistical and visualization applications; generating algorithms to alert users to aberrations in health events; and leveraging high-performance computational resources for large data sets or complex analyses.
· Interpretation – Determining usefulness of comparing information from one surveillance program with other data sets (related by time, place, person, or condition) for new perspectives and combining data of other sources and quality to provide a context for interpretation.
· Dissemination – Recommending appropriate displays of information for users and the best methods to reach the intended audience; facilitating information finding; and identifying benefits for data providers.
· Application to public health programs – Assessing the utility of having surveillance data directly flow into information systems that support public health interventions and information elements or standards that facilitate this linkage of surveillance to action and improving access to and use of information produced by a surveillance system for workers in the field and health-care providers.
Web References
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2015). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (3rd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Role of Public Health Informatics in Enhancing Public Health Surveillance. Retrieved: July 27th 2012. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6103a5.htm
The National Academic Press. Retrieved from: https://www.nap.edu/read/10548/chapter/5 [Show Less]