Hospital information system

There are various titles and acronyms which all declare similar approaches to managing the information flow and storage in hospital routine services, as

• Hospital Information System (HIS), or
• Healthcare Information System, or
• Clinical Information System (CIS), or
• Patient Data Management System (PDMS)

are comprehensive, integrated information systems designed to manage the medical, administrative, financial and legal aspects of a hospital and its service processing. Traditional approaches encompass paper-based information processing as well as resident work position and mobile data acquisition and presentation.

Architecture

Generally all breeds are supported in client-server architectures for networking and processing. Most work positions for HIS currently are resident types. Mobile computing started with wheeled PC stands and now comes to age with tablet-PC and smartphone applications.

Up to date a cloud computing alternative is not recommended, as data security of individual patient records services are not well accepted by the public^[1][2][3][4].

HIS can be composed of one or a few software components with specialty-specific extensions as well as of a large variety of sub-systems in medical specialties, as e.g. Laboratory Information System (LIS), Radiology Information System (RIS) or Picture archiving and communication system (PACS).

CISs are sometimes separated from HISs in that one focuses the flow management and clinical-state-related data and the other focuses the patient-related data with the doctor's letters and the electronic patient record. However, the naming varies from vendor to vendor and from hospital to hospital.

Standardization

There is no standardization but for data formats and for data interchange, as with the HL7 initiative supported by ISO.

Aim

As an area of medical informatics the aim of an HIS is to achieve the best possible support of patient care and outcome and administration by presenting data where needed and acquiring data when generated with networked electronic data processing.

Benefits of HIS

• Easy Access to Patient Data to generate varied records, including classification based on demographic, gender, age, and so on. It is especially beneficial at ambulatory (out-patient) point, hence enhancing continuity of care. As well as, Internet-based access improves the ability to remotely access such data. ^[5]

• It helps as a decision support system for the hospital authorities for developing comprehensive health care policies.^[6]

• Efficient and accurate administration of finance, diet of patient, engineering, and distribution of medical aid.

• Improved monitoring of drug usage, and study of effectiveness. This leads to the reduction of adverse drug interactions while promoting more appropriate pharmaceutical utilization.

• Enhances information integrity, reduces transcription errors, and reduces duplication of information entries.^[7]

See also

• Medical record
• Online office suite
• Electronic health record (EHR)
• Electronic medical record (EMR)
• Laboratory information system (LIS)
• ICU quality and management tools
• Radiology information system (RIS)
• PACS (medical imaging)
• Medical technologist

Further reading

• Shortliffe EH, Cimino JJ eds. Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (3rd edition). New York: Springer, 2006
• National Institute of Clinical Excellence, Principles of Best Practice in Clinical Audit. London: NICE, 2002. (ISBN 1-85775-976-1)
• Olmeda, Christopher J. (2000). Information Technology in Systems of Care. Delfin Press. ISBN 978-0-9821442-0-6
• Payne PR, Greaves AW, Kipps TJ., CRC Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS): an integrated information management solution for collaborative clinical research, AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003;:967.

References

1. ^ Google to launch consumer health care service later this year (2008)
2. ^ Google's No Bellwether for Healthcare Cloud Services (2011)
3. ^ Google Health Service Discontinued (2011)
4. ^ Google Health termination statement on log-in webpage
5. ^ Clinical information systems definition in biohealthmatics.com, a US based career networking portal for biotechnology and healthcare informatics
6. ^ Healthcare information systems definition in Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an Indian research centre for health informatics
7. ^ Hospital information systems definition given by US based EMRConsultant.com