World Health Organization and Health Information Systems - Research Paper Example

 World Health Organization and Health Information Systems Table of Contents Issues to be investigated 3 WHO Health Focus 4 Remedies and Alerts 4 Decision Support System 5 Electronic Data Storage 6 Telemedical Support and Educational Purpose 6 Reference Databases 7 Health Metrics Network 8 Low levels of interest from the public 8 Integration of information for the public and private sectors 9 Conclusion 10 Reference: 12 Swaine, J. (2009). What do the World Health Organisation's pandemic alert levels mean? 13 Bibliography 14 Introduction The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) was officially established in 1948 as the United Nations (U.N.) health specialization agency. The socio-economic impact change has bought a drastic change in the industry and has turned into a susceptible reason for epidemic diseases. Scientific advancement has shown a sharp decrease of mortality rate and early detection and vaccination of infectious diseases such as: Small-pox, Polio, Diphtheria, Tuberculosis, Whooping Cough and more recently Hepatitis-B, Swine-Flu and Cervical cancer. W.H.O. fulfils its objectives through its core allocated functions: i) whenever a sole decision is to be taken among two, W.H.O. take the leadership role. ii) it shapes the research agenda and ensures the generation, translation and distribution of valuable knowledge; iii) it sets patterns and standards and promotes and monitors their implementation; iv) coherences ethical and evidence-based policy options; v) provides technical support, boosts change and builds sustainable institutional capacity; and vi) assess health trends and monitors the health situation (Lee,2009, p.xiii). With the implementation of Information System, every field of the society including the World Health Organization are facing improvement at a very fast pace. Information System is at the core of the health care profession. It has a massive progression in Health Care division in its different fields like electronic patient registries, management system, process and programmable evaluation and also in decision support system for clinics and diagnostic centers. It cuts down the cost and by manpower reduction and sophisticated technologies and proper implementation. Both the organization and the system have to be transformed in the right manner in order to effectively implement the process. Information System management is a careful act balanced between the organization and the system (Berg, 2001). This research explores the different information technologies like Health Information System, Decision Support System, Electronic Data Interchange, Internet, Tele-medical and Medical Images that are used in World Health Organization in the developed countries and analyses its advantages, problems and the impacts of those problems that can affect the Health Organization (Scielosp, 2004). Issues to be investigated World Health management department are very actively and effectively improving the various sectors to protect the population health. Few countries in different parts of the world today are using comprehensive systems to maintain this database. The organization has to take decisions on critical situations like measuring whether the policies and programs are working efficiently or not for different diseases like H.I.V. and A.I.D.S., malaria and tuberculosis as well as maintaining funds and workforce management. According to the World Health Organization, there are multiple benefits of using Information Management System (Carlson, 2007, p.1). WHO Health Focus The main aim of the World Health Organization (WHO) is to pursue activities that would help in generating better health standards for individuals across the world. Different schools of thought have different opinions with regards to the manner of achievement of the goals underlined by the organization. The aspect of defining a guiding principle to the organization with regards to the achievement of its objectives call for the need to ensure designs based on a large number or multiple frameworks. Certain aspect under this technique include a framework for a flat based decentralized organizational structure so as to promote faster and efficient decision making at the organization. Promotion of sustainable development in different regions would also help the organization to fulfill its aims of providing better living standards for people across the world (Gupta, 2010, p.361). The main focus of the organization lies in ensuring sustainable developments in the developing and poor nations so as to improve the standards of the healthcare sector. The health information system is a useful technology in this regard. The implementation of this technique will help the organization to focus upon the important aspects while integrating different data sets and other related department in a single unit. Data mining operations would largely help the organization to identify its focus areas and would also suggest strategies that could help bring about a revolution in the society. Remedies and Alerts Globalization has dramatically transformed the context in which W.HO works, offering both opportunities and challenges for health and its distribution. The sharing of best practices, treatments, and health strategies and transfer of knowledge and technology provide real benefits to population across the globe. Thus, all countries benefit from international standards for health and sustained advocacy on their behalf. Globalization of work helps W.H.O. to benefit health indirectly while promoting gender equality and human rights. Thus, it promotes better prospects of trade, economic growth by aid of information technology. Health Information Systems normally have a wide range of sources which are again based on demographic trends for a particular region. Some of the main sources highlighted by the organization for generating a database include census, surveys etc. Other important sources of data for the organization include data on health based surveillance, data for health based services as well as data generated from monitoring different activities which also includes data for health based infrastructure and finance (WHO, 2010). The virus affects the whole community causing pandemic, which is very-well prevented by the work of W.H.O. The levels drop and rise and the pandemic influence shown under explains in details whether it’s a post-peak period or a post-pandemic period. Countries share the health system pandemic caused, creating a signal for other countries (Swaine, 2009). Decision Support System HIS are used mainly in taking decision in diagnosis and clinical treatments and also for automated laboratory tests. These decisions can be rule based or cognitive and also can be simulated systems or tree-decision system that can include patients’ personal participation in the program. Several health problems like hypertension, asthma, depression can be reduced in an efficient way by using a standardized system at all the health care clinics with the help of HIS. Therefore it reduces the variability between the qualities of services (Scielosp, 2004). Electronic Data Storage The main advantage of Electronic system in HIS is the Electronic Patient Registries (EPR) which very effectively stores data about the patients and also it can be retrieved at any point of time to see the status of the patient. The proportion of finding the correct information is very high and it is a great time saving process as with its help, data can be found very quickly resulting in reduction of cost and redundancy (Scielosp, 2004). Telemedical Support and Educational Purpose Health Information System is a growing area for the Interactive Health Communication (IHC). It acts as a very good platform for communicating with the people in order to give them support with respect to their health problem or it can be also be for educational purposes. It is mainly concerned with communicating with the patient, consumers or professionals or medical students for the transfer of health related information or support for some health related issues. Internet, T.V., Radio, Print are one of the leading platform nowadays for communicating with the people. People can collect any information from the internet from different sites and can educate themselves. In case of any emergency, people can get support 24 x 7 from the medical organizations and also can enquire about various health related issues (Scielosp-a, 2004). Reference Databases To investigate certain clinical observations, relative information can be taken as reference from previous cases with the type of diagnostics done earlier or different biomedical literatures can be very useful for dealing with critical situations of the future. It also saves a lot of time and cost for the organization which would have to extensively searches in the near future if there are no reference databases (Scielosp-a, 2004). Fig. 1 Health information domains (Source: Carlson, 2007, p.2) Health Metrics Network In order to improve Health Management Information System, the Health Metrics Network was developed in the year 2005 to help the international effort by analyzing the problems and providing financial as well as technical supports by collecting information globally. It looks after the following two important parts. Low levels of interest from the public One of the vital building blocks of HMIS is vital registration system i.e. the record of death and birth in the country. Low government activity is one the main reason for this inefficient database collection which calls for making vital registration system compulsory. In many countries with gender biased society, there is also a tendency to hide the death rate of girls and women. Wrong information from the people of the country hampers the accurate counting of the population strength. Integration of information for the public and private sectors Private sectors often do not want to share their information to the public sector department as they feel they might have their own established system and do not want to leak out their own resources to any outsiders. This problem is one of the major problems for adapting Health Information System in many countries, thus becomes a strong barrier in establishing a unified system for Health information (Carlson, 2007, p.3). National Program & Competing donor requirements Due to fragmented data collection from the different programs by the donors, there is huge loss of information. Due to this, a proper advocacy is required otherwise the Ministries of Health are facing much difficulty in the projection of national disease control programs. Another important reason for the failure of HMIS is due to the variation in data from country to country and amongst the different sectors of the country. Thus, a generalized Health Management Information System cannot be implied to the different systems easily. Conclusion W.H.O. takes action to tackle challenges and realize the potentiality and take proper initiatives to cope with future health crisis. W.H.O. in the crisis period acts as an effective partner amongst many other government agencies and reviews the procedures for prompt responses. W.H.O. provides a flawless understanding of health-related human rights and health-equity. It also focuses more attention and makes sure that, countries have enough human resource for health and they always prioritize national and international policy. W.H.O. works to strengthen health systems and engages systematically with civil industry and society, both international pharmaceutical and health industries. Thus, W.H.O. set priorities by providing support to countries by resorting to universal reportage with effectual public health intrusions. It also strengthens global health security and W.H.O.’s global, regional and national government work. It generates and sustains actions across segments to modify the behavioral, economic, social and environmental determinants of health. W.H.O. also increases institutional capacities, thus delivering core public health occasions (The Global Agenda, 2006, p.7). Therefore, from the study on World Health Organization & Health Information System, we can see there is a rapid growth in Health IT and there are several benefits like reference databases for getting case-specific information, data repositories at clinics, data repositories for administration, decision support system and also Internet-based knowledge and interactive health information (Hmis, n.d.). But from our finding we can see there is a vast problem in implementing Health Management Information System due to unskilled operators as there is problem in data overloading, physical order entry system errors and others as well (Herrick, Gorman, Goodman, 2010). A proper measurement should be done and accurate coding for diagnosis is required by the clinicians to monitor diseases for future references. Failing to do so will result in lot of time consumption and cost for the country and its people (Carlson, 2007, p.4). Another problem which is very difficult to solve is the inefficiency of skilled persons to fill the forms at clinics accurately. Without proper data collection from different sources, the exact diagnosis is not possible for future reference. Skilled labors should be employed in order to cope with this situation and implement Health Management Information System in a unified manner (Carlson, 2007, p.4). Finally, data storage and use of data is another issue which should be taken care of. Often, while implementing Health Information System, emphasis given to the technical aspects of the system overlooking the root of the problem i.e. data collection properly. Poor collection of data from different country will always lead to wrong interpretation and implementation of the Information System. Thus, before implementation, the data collection should be done for proper planning and also for management purposes (Carlson, 2007, p.5). Reference: Berg, M. (2001). Abstract. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11734382 . Carlson, (2007). Health management information systems. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.eldis.org/download.cfm?downloadfile=001EC3F5-E24D-9A8F-46D3A61AFDC2059C&typename=dmFile&fieldname=filename. Gupta, J. (2010). Global Sustainable Development Governance: Institutional Challenges from a Theoretical Perspective. Retrieved April 05, 2011 from https://springerlink3.metapress.com/content/wm51q1954l104344/resource-secured/?target=fulltext.pdf. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. Herrick, M. et.al. (2010). Problems with Health Information Technology. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st327.pdf. Hmis. (No Date). How information systems support evidence-based practice. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.homebaseccc.org/PDFs/HMIS/HMISBenefits.pdf. Scielosp. (2004). Health information technology in primary health care in developing countries: a literature review. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?pid=S004296862004001100012&script=sci_arttext&tlng=es. Swaine, J. (2009). What do the World Health Organisation's pandemic alert levels mean? The Telegraph. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/5236497/Swine-flu-What-do-the-World-Health-Organisations-pandemic-alert-levels-mean.html. The Global Agenda. (2006). Setting WHO Priorities. Retrieved April 04, 2011 from http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2006/GPW_eng.pdf. WHO. (2010). Core Program Clusters. Retrieved April 6, 2011 from http://www.whoindia.org/en/Section2_1522.htm. Bibliography Kelly, L. (2009). The World Health Organisation. British Library Cataloguing. Read More