Essay --

When you dial 911 for an emergency, the outcome may very well depend on the 411 – the quality of information available on your condition and ways to treat it. Everybody will experience an Emergency Room visit at some point in their life, go through the extensive admittance process and will be expected to wait for a considerable amount of time before they get treated. The treatment might not come right away depending on the severity of the injury. But have you ever wondered why this always happens? It is obvious that hospitals are always busy; you’ll see nurses always running around and hear doctors’ names being called on the PA, all of this caused by the endless amount of people that get admitted every second of the day. What people aren’t aware of is that there’s an uprising problem that’s present throughout the whole healthcare system. The healthcare industry generates massive amounts of data every day, part of which is sourced and document ed from ancient times. Not every bit of information generated has been in a format readily understood by people in the medical field. To help better acquire, document and understand this information, and to create practical guidelines and applications in today’s healthcare industry, Health Informatics has been created as a discipline. Many medical informatics systems have been developed for maintaining patient records in the doctor’s offices, clinics, and individual hospitals, and in many instances systems have been developed for distributing information among multiple hospitals and agencies. But much remains to be done to make such information systems maximally useful, issues surrounding confidentiality and ethics plus the lack of funds and training pose as the biggest challenges. The advance... ...tics to Improve Environmental Health Practice† published in the Journal of Environmental Health, asserts that the Environmental Health Specialists Network Information System (EHSNIS) program has been implemented by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health to serve as a model of how health informatics would translate into the health environmental field. The EHSNIS’ main purpose is to accumulate data from numerous areas to track of a potential â€Å"foodborne and water-borne illness outbreak† (44). On the local to global scale an integrated informatics system would enable health professionals to detect and track natural health emergencies. More importantly this emphasizes on how the collaboration of two different organizations in making of an informatics system that could detect of a potential outbreak should serve as a model