Handling A Hospital Visit

Public health authorities are responsible for community health care. To achieve the objective of providing timely, equitable and efficient health care and analyze the effectiveness of health care facilities available to the population of the region, the authorities initiated the health information exchange. Health information system is to communicate within the community or hospital within the region.

Health information exchange (HIE) enables to electronically move medical information among different health care information systems and also preserve the meaning of the data being exchanged. HIE facilitates access to and retrieval of clinical information to assist in rendering safe, prompt and effective health care to patients. Public health authorities also use the information available in HIE to analyze and review the health of the population in a stipulated region.

Other than HIE, CPOE is another IT enabled health care tool that provides for instructions of relevant physicians to be communicated over a computer network, to the medical staff or to the administration responsible to carry out the instructions. Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) is a method that minimizes the delay in following up the instructions, reduces the mistakes pertaining to handwriting, allows the instruction to be entered at point of care, helps in checking errors for incorrect or duplicate tests and simplifies the posting and record of charges.

CPOE is beneficial and help people in various ways.

- The divergent views of physicians are assimilated and directions issued to all concerned and involved health care support staff to circumvate scheduling problems, improve response time and avert any difference with existing instructions.

- The safety aspects of a patient are taken care by the CPOE system. It allows actual time identification of the patient, recommends proper drug dose, provides details of unfavorable drug reaction, helps check on allergies and treatment deviation. Accessing these information's doctors and caregivers can evaluate and accordingly take care of the patient.

- The CPOE system is user friendly and allows efficient use by unusual and novice users to use the instructions and work flow.

- The information stored in the system is fully secured and can be accessed by appropriate electronic signature.

- The system helps produce statistical data and online reports that help administrators evaluate patient information and make changes to improve productivity and best utilization of resources. Such information also helps in planning, training and scrutiny of events for patient safety.

- The system can be accessed from any locality through various communicating devices including Personal Computers and tablet computers, and it takes, handles and disseminates information for all at the spot of care.

- Previously the written documents were misrepresented and patients were at risk. The CPOE system prevents such prescribing errors and improves the security and effectivenessof medication.

HIE and CPOE are proved to be efficient method for patients of various communities.