Managing Information Centre in Health Sector - Coursework Example

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN HEALTH CARE xxxx xxxx March The term information management does not only mean the collection, ification and distribution or ‘making-available-of-information’ but also includes the methods of acquiring information, processes related to the authentication of it and the delivery of information in any kind of manner; be it verbal or printed or be it in an electronic form. What matters is that the information obtained must be reliable and well classified, which would in turn lead to a strong structured availability of information and would be easier to utilize, with a lesser margin of errors as compared to that of cramped information. The ‘BNET Business Dictionary’ defines Information Management as; The acquisition, recording, organizing, storage, dissemination and retrieval of information. Good information management has been described as getting the right information to the right person in the right format at the right time. The term is not only confined to management of information but is also related to what information is needed and how it can be acquired, the collection of irrelevant data or information is not a part of information management and is defined by what organisation employs the use of that information, for what data is considered useless in one manner might be useful in another. Every institution and every organization makes use of information and it is therefore important to manage it in a manner beneficial for the respective organisation or institution. What this essay seeks to reason about, concerns the information management in the health sector and the issues concerned with it. The delicacy of Information Management in health sector cannot be better emphasised upon, than the way it is done in The African Development Forum 99 by Economic Commission for Africa (ECA): Picture this scenario. A two-month old baby girl with meningitis was admitted to the emergency room of the hospital in a near-death situation. Laboratory tests confirmed the presence of rare bacteria in her spinal fluid. Troubled by the nature of the disease, the paediatrician in charge requested the hospital library to search for information on the infection. A search on various information resources available on the Internet lead to a "few scattered reports in very obscure journals." None of them was carried by the hospital library. Contacting other medical libraries, by telephone and fax, the required information was shortly at hand. It only took two and one half hours between log on and information to hand. The baby was successfully treated… (Information and Communication Technology for Health Sector, P # 3) What the quote reflects is the life saving factor for a patient; ‘information’, and not just random information but well organized information which was made available at such a short notice due to the application of modern technology. When we talk about Information Management in health sector, it must be noted that peoples’ lives depend on the process through which information is made-available. But like any other organization, the health sector also has its own restrictions and compulsions, both from the stake holder’s side and also from the government’s side. Information is what’s needed to form a decision and the authenticity of the information should be sufficient enough to help the decision maker and to support the decision made. In the health sector the examples of decision making include selecting between treatments, new technologies, new machinery, construction of new departments, selecting between research to be performed and many other wide-ranged decision making areas. It is important for the person requiring information to explain his/her need to the provider of that particular information so that the provider can weigh and balance the authenticity and relation of the information he provides with respect to the query. What information management basically deals with in health sector is: People Methodology Technology Content Each mentioned aspect plays a key role in an organization with a fully functional information management system and is dependent on each other. If we start from the very first characteristic of information management i.e. ‘people’, we determine that people shape the very basis and structure of information itself which includes the initial collection of data and its preservation. In case of health care sector, if we consider the staff looking after a patient; they provide the first hand information concerning the symptomatic development of the patient while if we take into account the doctors; they provide analysis based information regarding their treatments or methods of treatments regarding a patient. Similarly by considering the administration of a hospital we conclude that the Admin provides reliable information concerning the availability of doctors, staff, their conduct, etc (it must be stated that the mentioned providers of information do not provide solely the information discussed but in fact contribute in numerous other ways along with those mentioned). It is observed that the information provided by the staff, patient, doctors and the admin must be organized and computed if it is to be used by other similar personnel. One cannot state that the information gathered by a person working in a specific field will ‘only’ be used by a person of that specified field but in reality it is interrelated to each other, for instance a patient visits a hospital and provides information about whatever his condition might be. The administration provides him with information concerning the doctor while also informing the doctor regarding the patient. The doctor examines and starts the treatment concerning which the staff gives positive feedback to the doctor who in turn provides this information to the patient, the admin and other doctors to help them in the future diagnosis and treatment of similar cases. Hence an interrelated chain exists in the medical sector which requires the exchange of information thus resulting in the need of proper information management in the health sector. What through information management is then achieved is the proper handling of information through information databases and centres from which each category of people working in hospitals can benefit and feed information to. The methodology applied during the acquisition of information plays a vital role in classification and authenticity of that information, for if it is gathered through doubtful means and then fed to an information centre, surely the applicability of that data would be quite useless. An instance of ‘doubtful’ means include information gathered through methods not supported by the organisation or delivered to the information centre via the use of one’s memory or information acquired about anything for which the acquisition of data was prohibited. What methodology is applied guarantees the safe delivery of data from the collector to the centre along with the authenticity issues it resolves, an instance of a more reliable method of acquiring and delivering information would be the use of written form instead of one’s memory. Third is the role of technology with respect to information management in health sector. One does not need to explain or think very deeply to comprehend what technology has brought to us today. The very stars man marvelled at seem close at hand by the application of technology, however to employ technology in the health care system is a task an individual hospital must achieve on its own. More advanced the handling of information, more positive would be the result obtained. What part technology plays in health care range from simple computers to a system forming a whole medical library of that individual hospital within, which not only provides information to the people working for that hospital but also to other institutions which can benefit from it along with people looking for tips regarding ways to improve their personal health. Consequently what role technology plays in health care can be explained while comparing a complete verbal lecture to a multimedia supported lecture which provides visual aid along with the verbal lecture. Technology in health sector has not only saved lives but also eased the path for information travel. One click on the internet now provides information regarding all available treatments, for a particular disease, from various authentic and known medical libraries. With the evolution of technology, it has become the need of time to employ more efficient and practical means of information management in order to achieve the efficient functioning of the ‘inter-related chain’ of consumers and providers of information. The last and final aspect of information management in health sector would be the ‘content’ of the information acquired which can be defined as the ‘quality of the content’ or its ‘validity’. James Benneyan (1995, pp.289-301) writes: Simply stated, quality improvement refers to organized, rational, scientifically valid programs that analyze what people are doing - in industry, medicine or any other area – and then devise ways in which the job can be done better. Health care is not a sector from which the sub-standard information may be accepted. A very minor, lack or excess of information could result in devastating effects and considering the availability of that information to the medical library, could cause a huge problem to the organisation by critics or quality maintaining agencies in health care; hence the need for a proper developed and well equipped information management centre in health care sector, as best stated by a renowned management expert Peter Drucker: “Hospitals have not changed their basic delivery system since the early 1900’s and it needs to be changed now”. The comparison of information management in health sector as compared to any other organization leads us to notice that apart from the very ‘importance’ of information management and the urgent ‘need’ of it in the health sector it works pretty much in the same way. The health sector competes within itself with various institutions just like any other organisations, the aim is to increase the efficiency or to increase value of the work done at a lesser cost, and most of it is a duplicate of what other organisations employ. But what is different is the mass sharing of information in a productive manner in order to improve social health overall and speed up the diagnosis to treatment ratio. While other organisations mostly share a major part of their information within itself out of competition, the health sector doesn’t. All of its focus is on treatment of the patients and of course the revenue generated despite of which medical organisations do not hold back crucial information. What currently the information management centres are focusing upon is termed as a paradigm shift which may be elaborated by saying that the main effort is upon providing better quality at a relatively lower cost. A specialist in this particular area, Joel Barker (1992) states about paradigm that it is: A set of rules and regulations (written or unwritten) that does two things; (1) it establishes and defines boundaries; and (2) it tells you how to behave inside the boundaries in order to be successful. In lieu of the above discussion concerning the management of information it is safe to conclude that the information management in health care must be taken seriously and centres built for the very handling of information; formed at a large scale. Health Care sector, as compared to other organisations is way behind in the application of information management and the technological needs concerned with it. This very constituent of health care; ‘people’s lives’ gives it an upper hand to other organisations in being the most eligible candidate where information management should be most advanced and highly backed by technology. Sadly that is not the current scenario, but steps are being taken to strengthen information management in heath sector. Bibliography Managing Information Systems for Health Services in a Developing Country: A Case Study using Contextualist Framework. Jayasuria, Rohan. October 1999, International Journal of Information Management, pp. 335-349. The Role of Information Technology in health Care COst Containment. Lun, K.C. 1995, Singapore Med. Journal, pp. 32-34. Applications of statistical Process Control(SPC) To improve Health Care. Benneyan, James. 1995, Proceedings of the 1995 Annual HIMSS Conference, pp. 289-301. Baker, Joel Arthur (1992), Paradigms, Harper Business, New York, NY. “Information and Communication Technology for Health Sector”, The African Development Forum 99, Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Read More