Healthcare Informatics and

Information System
In 2002 a summit was held regarding
Health Profession Education
-its goal is to assist the Institute of
Medicine (IOM) to develop strategies to
ensure that educational systems for
health professionals were consistent with
the 21st century health care system
- reports stated that doctors, nurses,
pharmacists and other health care
professionals are not adequately
prepared to provide highest quality and
safest medical care.
 -to meet this challenge, educators,
licensing and certification organization
ensures that students, working
professionals develop and maintain
the 5 core point areas:
1. patient centered care
2. interdisciplinary teams
3. evidence based practice
4. quality improvement
5. informatics
IOM wants health care professionals to
be computer, information and informatics
literate
American Health Information Mgt. Assoc.
(AHIMA) and American Medical
Informatics Association (AMIA) focused
on the education of the health care
workforce
This call was answered by the American
Nursing Assoc. (ANA), National League of
Nurses and the American Assoc. of
Colleges of Nursing (AACN)
- they identified informatics competencies
that are required for all Nurses which
were categorized into 3 overall areas
1. computer literacy
2. information literacy
3. professional development/leadership
Definition of some Healthcare
Informatics and Related Terms
1.Health Care Informatics- the study of
how healthcare data, information,
knowledge and wisdom are collected,
stored, processed, communicated and
used to support the process of health
care delivery to clients, providers,
administrators and organizations involved
in the healthcare delivery.
-concerned with the application of
information and computer science
concepts and theories to the delivery of
health care. It is and interdiciplinary
science delopedt from integration of
information science, computer science,
and health care sciences.
2. Information Science- focuses on the
study of information generation,
transmission and use.
Originated from the study of Shannon and
Weaver (1949) theory of information –
focuses on communication of information.
Transmission of message from a sender
to a receiver and the standard used in
teaching communication concepts to
health care providers.
Blum further established this theory in
giving historical overview of computers in
health care. He grouped medical
applications according to objects they
processed namely;
1. data processing
2. information processing
3. knowledge processing
Using Blum’s model Graves and
Corcoran(1989) “The Study of Nursing
Informatics”
proposed that it should include:
- 4.Nursing Data information and
5.knowledge and later the same year
Nelson and Joos (1989) added
wisdom to this continuum
3. Data- these are raw facts
-exists w/o meaning or interpretation
-these are attributes that healthcare
professional collects, organize and name.
-can be interpreted in many different ways
4. Information-collection of data that has been
processed to produce meaning.
Different techniques to process data
1. classifying
2. sorting
3. organizing
4. summarizing
5. graphing
6. calculating
There are also factors that can influence
the interpretation of data.
1. education
2. attitudes
3. emotions
4. goals
-Information System is a system that
processes data, organize the various
information, organizing the various
elements into meaningful unit of
information.
5. Knowledge- a collection of interrelated
pieces of information and data.
Knowledge base is the organized
collection of interrelated information about
a specific topic

6. Wisdom- knowing when and how to

use ethical decision making that ensures
cost-effective quality care requires
wisdom