Healthcare Informatics has really grown as a field and I want to use this space to air out some of my thoughts as I learn about it. I'm currently an MBA student, and I want to see all the different angles of delivering healthcare technology and management in that process.
It seems to break down in to a couple of different areas, and that categorization probably changes depending where you're located in the chain of people affected: patient, medical practitioner, IT specialist, software or hardware company. I'm interested in everything, including policy and the proliferation of associated technologies (think electronic health records or RFID in the hospital, for example), but I'm most interested in providing the IT solutions to the end users (medical staff, and sometimes, the patient).
I invite people to comment or add their thoughts.
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If you are interested in providing IT solutions to the end users (medical staff, patients, etc.) you might want to take a survey on what types of services might benefit them. For instance, as a patient, I would be interested in having like a web portal to access my own medical records, view my profile, pay invoices, etc. Also, would be helpful to be able to fill out forms online, which would then be sent directly to the hospital/clinic... or maybe fill out certain other forms to reveal my medical history/current illnesses, etc. It would be a great idea if the doctor can then take that information and consult me virtually, be able to prescribe me drugs electronically, which I can print out and take to a drugstore.
This is a really great set of observations, and actually many enterprise software companies have the clinical and non-clinical features you mention. Epic systems MyChart, for example, gives patients access to their own medical records, and Epic Rx dispenses prescriptions to a designated pharmacy of the patient's choice (eliminating the need to take a piece of paper to a drugstore). This second example has come in to the public eye quite recently, since 2004 Vioxx recall tested the functionality of health care technology. Patients prescribed the drug within a year leading to the recall were contacted within 24 hours of the recall, a task not possible without the automation of prescribing medication.
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