Health Informatics

Chapter

Abstract

Computers have been used in healthcare for many years for administrative, clinical, and research purposes. Health informatics is concerned with the use of data for the management of disease and the healthcare process. Increasingly health informatics is using data and approaches developed for bioinformatics and vice versa and there are many areas where computational intelligence has the potential to make a useful contribution to health informatics. Health informatics is both a practical profession and an area of research. This chapter deals with the organization of healthcare, areas of development of health informatics in recent times, and some active areas of research that may be relevant.

Keywords

Secondary Care Electronic Health Record Clinical Decision Support System Personal Health Record Unify Medical Language System 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Abbreviations

APACHE

acute physiology, age, chronic health evaluation

BC

blast crisis

CDSS

clinical decision support system

DICOM

digital imaging and communications in medicine

EHR

electronic health record

GDP

guanosine diphosphate

GIS

geographical information system

HIPPA

Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act

HL7

Health Level 7

ICD

international classification of disease

IT

infero temporal cortex

MeSH

medical subject heading

NHS

N-hydroxysuccinimidyl

RCT

randomized controlled trial

SNOMED

Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms

SNOP

Systematized Nomenclature of Pathology

UMLS

unified medical language system

XML

extensible markup language

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access

References

  1. 34.1.
    B. Obama: Modern health care for all Americans, N. Engl. J. Med. 359, 1537–1541 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 34.2.
    F. Olesen, J. Dickinson, P. Hjortdahl: General practice-time for a new definition, BMJ 320, 354–357 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. 34.3.
    S. de Lusignan: What is primary care informatics?, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 10, 304–309 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 34.4.
    S. Teasdale, D. Bates, K. Kmetik, J. Suzewits, M. Bainbridge: Secondary uses of clinical data in primary care, Inform. Prim. Care 15, 157–166 (2007)Google Scholar
  5. 34.5.
    A.D. Mackinnon, R.A. Billington, E.J. Adam, D.D. Dundas, U. Patel: Picture archiving and communication systems lead to sustained improvements in reporting times and productivity: Results of a 5-year audit, Clin. Radiol. 63, 796–804 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 34.6.
    W.A. Knaus, D.P. Wagner, E.A. Draper, J.E. Zimmerman, M. Bergner, P.G. Bastos, C.A. Sirio, D.J. Murphy, T. Lotring, A. Damiano: The APACHE III prognostic system. Risk prediction of hospital mortality for critically ill hospitalized adults, Chest 100, 1619–1636 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. 34.7.
    E. Golestanian, J.E. Scruggs, R.E. Gangnon, R.P. Mak, K.E. Wood: Effect of interhospital transfer on resource utilization and outcomes at a tertiary care referral center *, Crit. Care Med. 35, 1470–1476 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 34.8.
    R. Rabiei, P.A. Bath, A. Hutchinson, D. Burke: The national programme for IT in England: Clinicianʼs views on the impact of the Choose and Book service, Health Inform. J. 15, 167–178 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. 34.9.
    R. Lenz, M. Beyer, K.A. Kuhn: Semantic integration in healthcare networks, Int. J. Med. Inform. 76, 201–207 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. 34.10.
    B. Kaplan: Evaluating informatics applications–clinical decision support systems literature review, Int. J. Med. Inform. 64, 15–37 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 34.11.
    J.L.Y. Liu, J.C. Wyatt: The case for randomized controlled trials to assess the impact of clinical information systems, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 18, 173–180 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. 34.12.
    J.I. Westbrook, J. Braithwaite, A. Georgiou, A. Ampt, N. Creswick, E. Coiera, R. Iedema: Multimethod evaluation of information and communication technologies in health in the context of wicked problems and sociotechnical theory, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 14, 746–755 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 34.13.
    S.J. Pritchard, A.L. Weightman: Medline in the UK: Pioneering the past, present and future, Health Inform. Libr. J. 22, 38–44 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. 34.14.
    P. Fontelo, F. Liu, M. Ackerman: askMEDLINE: A free-text, natural language query tool for MEDLINE/PubMed, BMC Med. Inform. Decis. Mak. 5, 5 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 34.15.
    K. Donnelly: SNOMED-CT: The advanced terminology and coding system for eHealth, Stud. Health Technol. Inform. 121, 279–290 (2006)Google Scholar
  16. 34.16.
    R.H. Dolin, L. Alschuler, S. Boyer, C. Beebe, F.M. Behlen, P.V. Biron, A. Shabo Shvo: HL7 clinical document architecture, release 2, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 13, 30–39 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. 34.17.
    D. Protti, T. Bowden, I. Johansen: Adoption of information technology in primary care physician offices in New Zealand and Denmark, part 4: Benefits comparisons, Inform. Prim. Care 16, 291–296 (2008)Google Scholar
  18. 34.18.
    W.D. Bidgood Jr., S.C. Horii, F.W. Prior, D.E. Van Syckle: Understanding and using DICOM, the data interchange standard for biomedical imaging, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 4, 199–212 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. 34.19.
    S. Woolhandler, T. Campbell, D.U. Himmelstein: Costs of health care administration in the United States and Canada, N. Engl. J. Med. 349, 768–775 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. 34.20.
    W.E. Hammond: The making and adoption of health data standards, Health Aff. 24, 1205–1213 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 34.21.
    J.E. Wennberg: Unwarranted variations in healthcare delivery: Implications for academic medical centres, BMJ 325, 961–964 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. 34.22.
    D. Gans, J. Kralewski, T. Hammons, B. Dowd: Medical groupsʼ adoption of electronic health records and information systems, Health Aff. 24, 1323–1333 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. 34.23.
    C. Schoen, R. Osborn, M.M. Doty, D. Squires, J. Peugh, S. Applebaum: A survey of primary care physicians in eleven countries, 2009: Perspectives on care, costs, and experiences, Health Affairs 28, 1171–1183 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. 34.24.
    M. Eichelberg, T. Aden, J. Riesmeier, A. Dogac, B. Laleci: A survey and analysis of electronic healthcare record standards, ACM Comput. Surv. 37(4), 277–315 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. 34.25.
    G.B. Smith, D.R. Prytherch, P. Schmidt, P.I. Featherstone, D. Knight, G. Clements, M.A. Mohammed: Hospital-wide physiological surveillance - A new approach to the early identification and management of the sick patient, Resuscitation 71, 19–28 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. 34.26.
    E. H. Shortliffe: Mycin: A rule-based computer program for advising physicians regarding antimicrobial therapy selection (Stanford AI Lab Memo AIM-251 1974), p. 411Google Scholar
  27. 34.27.
    A.X. Garg, N.K.J. Adhikari, H. McDonald, M.P. Rosas-Arellano, P.J. Devereaux, J. Beyene, J. Sam, R.B. Haynes: Effects of computerized clinical decision support systems on practitioner performance and patient outcomes: A systematic review, J. Am. Med. Assoc. 293, 1223–1238 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  28. 34.28.
    L. Bannink, S. Wells, J. Broad, T. Riddell, R. Jackson: Web-based assessment of cardiovascular disease risk in routine primary care practice in New Zealand: The first 18000 patients (PREDICT CVD-1), J. N. Z. Med. Assoc. 119, U2313 (2006)Google Scholar
  29. 34.29.
    L. Kohn, J. Corrigan, M. Donaldson: To err is human: Building a Safer Health System (National Acadamies Press, Washington 2000)Google Scholar
  30. 34.30.
    L.L. Weed: Medical records that guide and teach, N. Engl. J. Med. 278, 593–600 (1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  31. 34.31.
    E.G. Poon, C.A. Keohane, C.S. Yoon, M. Ditmore, A. Bane, O. Levtzion-Korach, T. Moniz, J.M. Rothschild, A.B. Kachalia, J. Hayes, W.W. Churchill, S. Lipsitz, A.D. Whittemore, D.W. Bates, T.K. Gandhi: Effect of bar-code technology on the safety of medication administration, N. Engl. J. Med. 362, 1698–1707 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  32. 34.32.
    G. Eysenbach: Infodemiology: Tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance, AMIA Annu. Symp. Proc. (2006) pp. 244–248Google Scholar
  33. 34.33.
    P. Swinfen, R. Swinfen, K. Youngberry, R. Wootton: Low-cost telemedicine in Iraq: An analysis of referrals in the first 15 months, Telemed. Telecare 11, 113 (2005)Google Scholar
  34. 34.34.
    W. Kaplan: Can the ubiquitous power of mobile phones be used to improve health outcomes in developing countries?, Glob. Health 2, 9 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  35. 34.35.
    D.-O. Kang, K. Kang, H.-J. Lee, E.-J. Ko, J. Le: A context aware framework for u-healthcare in a wearable system, World Congr. Medical Phys. Biomed. Eng. 2006, Imaging the Future Medicine (COEX Seoul 2006)Google Scholar
  36. 34.36.
    J. Symonds, D. Parry, J. Briggs: An RFID-based system for assisted living: Challenges and solutions, Stud. Health Technol. Inform. 127, 127–138 (2007)Google Scholar
  37. 34.37.
    A. Rodgers, T. Corbett, D. Bramley, T. Riddell, M. Wills, R.B. Lin, M. Jones: Do u smoke after txt? Results of a randomised trial of smoking cessation using mobile phone text messaging, Tob. Control 14, 255–261 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. 34.38.
    D.C. Kaelber, A.K. Jha, D. Johnston, B. Middleton, D.W. Bates: A research agenda for personal health records (PHRs), J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 15, 729–736 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. 34.39.
    H. Andreassen, M. Bujnowska-Fedak, C. Chronaki, R. Dumitru, I. Pudule, S. Santana, H. Voss, R. Wynn: European citizensʼ use of E-health services: A study of seven countries, BMC Public Health 7, 53 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  40. 34.40.
    A. RojasDomínguez, A.K. Nandi: Toward breast cancer diagnosis based on automated segmentation of masses in mammograms, Pattern Recognit. 42, 1138–1148 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  41. 34.41.
    L. Ohno-Machado: Electronic health records and computer-based clinical decision support: Are we there yet?, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 18, 109 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  42. 34.42.
    A. OʼConnor, C. Bennett, D. Stacey, M. Barry, N. Col, K. Eden, V. Entwistle, V. Fiset, M. Holmes-Rovner, S. Khangura, H. Llewellyn-Thomas, D. Rovner: Decision aids for people facing health treatment or screening decisions, Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 3, CD001431 (2009)Google Scholar
  43. 34.43.
    J. Patrick, Y. Wang, P. Budd: An automated system for conversion of clinical notes into SNOMED clinical terminology, Proc. Fifth Australasian Symp. ACSW Frontiers, Vol. 68 (Australian Computer Society, Sidney 2007)Google Scholar
  44. 34.44.
    J.I. Westbrook, A. Ampt: Design, application and testing of the Work Observation Method by Activity Timing (WOMBAT) to measure cliniciansʼ patterns of work and communication, Int. J. Med. Inform. 7(8), S25–S33 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. 34.45.
    B. Houliston, D. Parry, A. Merry: Towards automated detection of anaesthetic activity, Methods Inf. Med. 50(5), 464–471 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  46. 34.46.
    J. Callen, A. Georgiou, J. Li, J.I. Westbrook: The safety implications of missed test results for hospitalised patients: A systematic review, BMJ Qual. Saf. 20, 194–199 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  47. 34.47.
    C.S. Webster, A.F. Merry, P.H. Gander, N.K. Mann: A prospective, randomised clinical evaluation of a new safety-orientated injectable drug administration system in comparison with conventional methods, Anaesthesia 59, 80–87 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  48. 34.48.
    E.O. Voit: A systems-theoretical framework for health and disease: Inflammation and preconditioning from an abstract modeling point of view, Math. Biosci. 217, 11–18 (2009)MATHMathSciNetCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  49. 34.49.
    A.D. Black, J. Car, C. Pagliari, C. Anandan, K. Cresswell, T. Bokun, B. McKinstry, R. Procter, A. Majeed, A. Sheikh: The impact of eHealth on the quality and safety of health care: A systematic overview, PLoS Medicine 8, 1–16 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Computing and Mathematical SciencesAuckland University of TechnologyAucklandNew Zealand

Personalised recommendations