Is Your Health Information Meeting Requirements?

By Author: Jamie Hanson
Total Articles: 3495
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Health information is a record of your health containing the detailed history, symptoms, examinations and test results. This proof is maintained each time you visit your physician, health care facility or any another health care provider. This is essential to have the personal health care records in tact. The other significant aspects for which your health information record is utilized are:

- Treatment planning is essential.

- Communicating among health care professionals anxious in your case,

- Serves as a legal document detailing the treatment and care you received.

- Confirmation of services actually provided and billed for payment by third party,

- Acts as a tool in educating health professionals

- The personally de-identified data is used for medical research as well as for improving 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, knowing your health information record helps you to ensure its corectness , whether your data is being accessed unauthorizedly and ...
... make informed decisions while authorizing exposure.

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 effect 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 significant 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 openly, 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 observed 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 reduces turn around time for lab tests by 25 percent; apart from the apparent benefit of eliminating drug errors associated with handwritten prescriptions. This hastens the treatment of the patient. Additionaly, CPOE combined all patient orders, radiology studies, medications, special diets, lab studies, tests and consultations in a single system.

For more details about the advantages of health information exchange check out the Half Penny website online; and also seeSEO services group ClickResponse.