With a workforce shortage, evolving healthcare policy, increasing levels of burnout, consumer expectations and technological capability on top of mounds of data being collected, the healthcare industry needs well-trained informatics and analytics professionals now more than ever.
There are debates about the sort of changes that healthcare needs to make, but one thing that is for certain is the value that information science brings to the table and, in particular, the science of informatics. It’s a vital component to driving the creation of a value-based system and improving the quality and effectiveness of the care we receive.
At a time when the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other wealthy developed nation, it’s the job of informatics professionals to use technology to help the industry define value, identify and implement processes for improvement, assess technology and craft new workflows that not only improve patient outcomes, but help reduce clinician burnout due to administrative burden and reduce costs.
Perceptions of Informatics
The question of what informatics is is probably something that you are already familiar with, but our vernacular around the topic doesn’t do us any favors for keeping our definition of the industry in focus. For example, the term health IT is ubiquitous. But when we use the phrase health IT, we are not referring to informatics specifically, but rather all of the industry segments that revolve around information technology in healthcare.
Informatics, specifically, is concerned with “the use of biomedical data, information and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health,” according to a webinar from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
It goes on to describe informatics as an interdisciplinary, integrative practice that includes the use of IT, change management strategies, human-computer interactions, workflow design and other aspects of executing care and measuring the results of actions taken in the process.
Part of the informatics professional’s goals is to manage health information through the process of data collection to its application and impact on healthcare. This occurs in stages as data points are identified, collected, structured, shared and ultimately applied.
Informatics in Practice
At a time when healthcare is shifting toward a value-based care model, where reimbursements are based on patient outcomes, streamlining the effectiveness of care is vital to the financial health of provider organizations. Informatics is central to these efforts.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has been working on developing a core data set to be shared called the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). These are data points that can be extracted from electronic health records (EHRs), patient surveys and data warehouses to be shared. Now, ONC is tying in Social Determinants of Health data, an illustration of how much informatics and analytics are evolving how we think about care.
As value-based and social determinants initiatives proliferate, informatics professionals will be at the center of healthcare innovation, devising new ways for health information to be collected, cleaned, examined by analytics experts and eventually put into practice.
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