INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN SAFETY AND QUALITY OF NURSING CARE
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of information technology in health care. Technology has been instrumental in the transformation of the health care to being quality oriented as opposed to the notion of being a fundamental necessity. As a result, it has helped improve the flow of information within the ranks by making the information needed available thus increasing the reliability.
Information technology has been critical to providing the practitioners with accurate information regarding the patient. It is a common trend in nursing and behavioral frameworks of the patient to attempt to provide misleading information to the practitioners for reasons best known to the victims. However, the use of information technology has been undisputedly important to the practice due to its capacity to perform proper data mapping and give the accurate information regarding the patient (American Nurses Association, 2015). Patients can thus not provide wrong information regarding their health history as well as their lifestyle. Having the right and accurate information is paramount in providing quality healthcare. It is important for the nurses to get accurate information regarding the patient so that they can perform an accurate diagnosis and make proper recommendations based on the history and facts of the patients as revealed in the mapped information (Dhable et al., 2014). Such efforts have only been made possible by information technology. It is important that patient information is well mapped to help make the work of the practitioners easy. Moreover, there is hope and guaranteed safety of personal information that has been rendered by information technology.
Technology offers safe ways through which sensitive patient information can be stored to ensure its availability is maintained. It also offers the best service regarding retaining the integrity and confidentiality of patient information. Despite the numerous security challenges faced due to information technology, there is a guarantee of the availability of the information since it can be retrieved at any given point. Also, even if the information is lost due to errors, it can be easily recovered through data recovery techniques available or use of expert recovery (Dhable et al., 2014). Nonetheless, the information can be stored using some forms of encryption to ensure that it’s out of malicious intruders. Encryption of information will make it safe and unlikely to be altered. It ensures that only right individuals access the information.
Two Strategies used to ensure safety and accuracy
The safety of medical data is provided through encryption. Data encryption is a way of sealing the sensitive information being sent through or stored in the system to ensure that its accessibility is discriminatively permitted (Health IT.gov, 2013). In encryption, the information is only accessible to the intended recipient. It uses special keys that are used for decrypting the information upon reaching the recipient. The intended recipient of the information can use the decryption keys to access the information. Through this technique, the information is safe and secure. Encryption also ensures that information remains accurate since it cannot be easily manipulated.
Also, the accuracy of information can be provided by information matching. In this technique, the information stored in the databases regarding the patient is filtered to ensure that it matches the information provided by the patient (Dhable et al., 2014). Information technology makes it very easy to detect the discrepancies in the information provided by the patient since any stored information can be matched to ensure that it has the expected levels of conformity to the original information.
Data integrity
Data integrity encompasses safety and ability to ensure that information is not accessible to any other party who can tamper with it thus manipulates it. It is often a critical subject as health records must always be maintained in their original form to allow for accurate handing of information (Bokur, 2012). It is important that health records are in a way that they cannot be manipulated for any reason and that the records can only be altered with the permission of the owner. Data integrity remains the most important role that information technology plays in health care. Through encryption of communication channels and databases, the integrity of data is guaranteed.
Encryption technique ensures that private and public keys are assigned to information sent via the system network thus ensure that right persons access right information. It ensures that relevant information only reaches relevant people thus making it difficult to tamper with it since they all poses the need for such information in its accurate form (Bokur, 2012). It is important for every healthcare providing organization to optimize the results and offer the patients the best service they can. It is the right of every patient to ensure to receive quality service from whichever hospital they deem appropriate. It is because healthcare is a basic requirement and a fundamental right of every citizen. It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that its citizens are offered the highest quality of medical care.
Importance of data integrity
Data integrity ensures that information is always dependable. It is imperative to note that information is only useful when it conveys the right message. Data integrity ensures that information contained is free form tampering. Therefore, it can be dependable in offering healthcare since it contains the true state of the patient as it has been found both in the past and the present. The focus of integrity is to ensure that data is reliable. It is often hard to have trust in data that is susceptible to misappropriation (Bokur, 2012). Therefore, integrity will ensure that information is always available in the form in which it is useful to the users. Practitioners only find the usefulness of records in their original form. However, when the information is altered, it loses the meaningfulness thus rendering it unreliable. Using such information can have undesired results on the patient due to the sensitive nature of medical information (Bokur, 2012).
Contributions of information technology
Information technology has been helpful in the healthcare due to its benefits of health information. One of the key contributions is that it provides availability of information. Information technology makes the information readily available to the practitioners for use at any given time. It also ensures easy communication. Communication is critical to healthcare. Information technology has made it easy to communicate both within and without the organization and the health facility (Health IT.gov, 2013). It has improved access to information. Information technology has made it very easy to access information form the existing data centers or portals for use in rendering healthcare. It has also enhanced the confidentiality of health information. The information can be disseminated in ways that only allows the target recipient to have access to it.
How information contributes to patient safety and access to health
Accuracy-information technology has ensured that accurate information is available to the practitioner thus making it easy to perform and handle the patient safely. The right information is critical to patient safety. It is important that the practitioner has accurate diagnostic information to provide proper care. As a result, the patient safety is guaranteed.
Information access-information technology has made it easy for the relevant information to be easily accessible. Having the relevant information is important for the care practitioner since it provides a broader knowledge base thus ensuring the patient is handling the right way thus providing safety (Health IT.gov, 2013). It minimizes the possibility of errors.
Summary
Information has become integral to the health care transformation since it has made access to information very easy. It has also provided the data security and improved its reliability thus improving the health care quality. Data integrity has also been improved by information technology by enabling encryption techniques to be applied to the dissemination of information along the communication channels. Therefore, information has helped optimize the quality of healthcare in general.
References
Dhable, S. S., Jose, M., Kothawade, P. R., Nilkanth, P. B., Gaidhani, A. R. (2014). A patient e-health care system using passive RFID. International C
Bokur, D. (2012). To ‘EACH’ its own incentive payment: New CCHIT program rewards groups with EHR systems. MGMA Connexion, 12(2), 33–34. Retrieved from
Health IT.gov (2013). How to attain meaningful use. Retrieved from http://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/how-attain-meaningful-use/
Health IT.gov (2013). Meaningful use definition & objectives. Retrieved from http://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/meaningful-use-definition/
American Nurses Association. (2015). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice (2nd ed.). Silver Spring, MD:
