Through the past several decades, collection of hospital and outpatient facility patient data has not only increased also has expanded among areas within these networks.
What used to be contained in a single section of a healthcare facility is now distributed to many sections within the facility, to sister facilities, and even to remote sections of participating partners and affiliates.
Without information technology, this expansion of intranets would not have been possible without an incredible amount of reduplication of materials and information.
Complete sets of patient information, records of inpatient and outpatient encounters, monitoring of bed availability, and patient case mix would have remained significantly restrained without informatics.
In order to compete and provide high quality care, information technology is a must for today's healthcare environments.
Patient administration systems contain master files of data of all patient information.
This includes demographics, insurance data, medical records, and diagnostic information.
Previously this information would be scattered throughout many different areas of a hospital, or in many cases when patients were seen at multiple centers, throughout many different hospitals themselves.
By providing electronic data collection and storage, this information can be organized into on database and accessed by many at the same time.
This has even allowed radiographic images to be stored and organized along with patient information which would otherwise be incredibly difficult.
Volume tracking of patients is another key area of patient administration systems that needs to be accurately monitored.
This allows predictions on staffing, supplies, ancillary service needs, etc.
Admissions and discharges as well as outpatient encounters are crucial to efficiently operate a facility.
As resources to provide effective healthcare has declined, efficiency has been the best answer.
Informatics by tracking these volume measures allows a facility to meet these efficiency goals better as exact figures can be assessed over time.
Even outpatient appointment schedules can be organized and improved as informatics allows easy ability to post schedule reminders and cancellations.
Since many states allocate hospital beds among facilities, tracking bed availability as part of patient administration systems has become increasingly important.
On one hand, when many hospitals within a state are operating at near-full capacity, being able to easily monitor bed availability enables patients to be relocated to areas where they will receive the best care.
On the other hand, some facilities close certain bed areas when volumes are reduced.
Tracking bed availability during these times lets hospitals or units know when to open or close areas to maximize profits.
In both instances, information technology makes this data readily available.
As a patient is admitted or discharged, information systems are updated providing almost a real-time knowledge of bed status.
Lastly as a means to provide better quality care to patients, patient administration systems record patient case mix among populations of centers, units, hospitals and even networks.
This can guide many services by identifying disease occurrence, epidemiology, length of stays, etc.
These resources can help alert medical professionals when certain health conditions are rising or declining.
In addition, certain diseases carry higher costs.
Case mix information lets hospitals and outpatient centers predict where financial resources need to be allocated.
With the electronic ability to record, store and transfer this information, case mix data holds tremendous potential for patient care.
From many perspectives patient administration systems provide widespread information that enables effective operation of a healthcare facility.
As facilities have developed into their own networks consisting of several entities, and as databases are being shared for the purpose of medical research, information technology has made these endeavors a possibility.
Without informatics, such ability to collect and distribute such a large amount of data would require an enormous amount of resources.
And this is one luxury that current healthcare cannot afford.
Reference Muscat, Hugo.
(2005).
Health Information and Medical Informatics.
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