What You Need to Know About Popular Software - Medical Informatics Software

By Levi Reiss Expert Author Levi Reiss Medical informatics marries health care with computer science. Its goal is to optimize the information associated with medical prevention and treatment. This complicated field may help us meet the cost and health challenges associated with an aging population in an increasingly complex and stressful world. Here are just a few major aspects of effective, efficient medical informatics systems. Electronic medical records should support billing, treatment, scheduling, and research while respecting individual privacy. The development of appropriate standards will enable transferring information from one system to another, perhaps across the globe. Specialized decision support systems help executives, managers and a wide range of medical and nursing personnel make decisions whether of a financial or a medical nature. Some people estimate that appropriate use of medical informatics could save more than one hundred thousand lives a year; for example seriously reducing the number of adverse drug reactions in which patients may die from an unfortunate combination of pharmaceutical products that may not be dangerous in and of themselves. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) is an international organization that actively promotes information science in medicine and health care. It brings together scientists, physicians, and interested business people with the goal of increasing research, development and education both in the developed and the developing world. The IMIA has formulated a Code of Ethics for Health Information Professionals. There are well over forty national societies represented in this organization, coming from every continent. The society includes a variety of Working and Special Interest Groups, composed of individuals who are particularly interested in certain aspects of medical informatics. Here you will find groups devoted to consumer and social issues, dental informatics, data mining, primary health care, nursing, and security among many others. Needless to say, many exciting medical informatics developments take place outside of this particular international organization. The United States has made a major commitment to the increasing use of computers in medicine and health care. For example, in 2004 the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formed the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT). Their goal is the widespread adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) in the US within 10 years. Unfortunately due to the complexity of health records such important projects require a great deal of time and resources. Many other countries or groups of countries have similar projects that may be more complicated due to language and other differences among the cooperating countries. Let's finish this article with a successful example of medical informatics. The Chinese city of Hong Kong employs a computerized patient record system originally developed in 1994. This system is used in all 40 Hong Kong hospitals and 120 clinics by a staff of thirty thousand. It includes records on 7 million patients and can handle up to two million transactions per day. The system now includes radiology images. Levi Reiss has authored or co-authored ten books on computers and the Internet. He teaches Linux and Windows operating systems plus other computer courses at an Ontario French-language community college. His brand-new site [http://www.php4windows.com][http://www.php4windows.com] shows you how to download (legally and for free) PHP and work with this software. For a break from computers check out his global wine website at http://www.theworldwidewine.com with his new weekly column reviewing $10 wines. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Levi_Reiss