Information Systems - Essay Example

Best of breed has a lot of advantages over one vendor. First best of breed is deeper and more industry specific. It also creates a potential that minimizes software functionality. The organization also gets the advantage of not getting locked with one vendor. One of the major disadvantages is the cost of ownership due to the expense of buying from different vendors unlike buying everything from one vendor. The best breed also adds a lot of complexity to the footprint of the IT (Hebda, 2009). Meditech is the name of the system used in all of the floors of the hospital.

It is where all nurses do their necessary assessment and documentation of various things in the system. The radiology laboratory also uses this system as well as the blood bank to know the amount of blood needed and available at a particular time. The pharmacy departments also use this system to control the flow of drugs in and out of the pharmacy and to store drug statistics. Doctors also use the same system to enter patient data. This system is available in English and Spanish. The system is interfaced such that it provides an easy to use paradigm.

The epic system is the system in use in the emergency rooms. The same system is used in the clinics and the urgent care rooms. This system is not as integrated as the Mediates but also has an easy to use interface. The system interface is HL7. It was specifically meant for use in healthcare facilities. It boasts as one of the most widely used application in healthcare places. Health level 7 provides a good interface that is user friendly. Data entry is made easier by the use of tables and forms.

The user is also able to change the interface color to the desired color without any problem. The font can also be adjusted to the desired level depending on the user needs. This is convenient especially for patients and staff members with bad vision. Information security and patient privacy are one of the major challenges faced by most organizations. However for our system, this is maintained by two very convenient ways. By domain authentication each and every user is located a unique address in the database.

To get into his/her account, each user needs a user name and a password. The username is unique to every user and the password is generated by the users themselves (Saba, 2009). This makes it very hard for someone to get into confidential patient information without the username and the password. The other way of ensuring security and privacy is through the encryption of data in the hard drive. Data stored in the hard drive is encrypted. Encryption is where the data is stored in different parts.

The data is Brocken down into unreadable parts and then stored differently. It is therefore impossible for one to read the data without having the whole parts of the data. This type of data protection is very convenient and ensures that incase of theft of a hard drive, the thief will not be able to decrypt back the data without the other part of the data or the encryption code. Yes I believe the system in my hospital provides enough nursing support. First of all it improves patient safety. This it does by providing a lot of support in decision making among the nurses.

Therefore, it reduces any chances of errors being made. The system is also very