Nature of the Health Information - Essay Example

"Nature of the Health Information" is a wonderful example of a paper on the health system.
Inputs, throughputs, and outputs

Earlier, the impact of the Nursing Information System (NIS) on Lower Bucks Hospital since the system was introduced to the hospital was discussed in terms of quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness. In this section of the research paper, the data that constitutes the inputs, throughputs, and outputs of the NIS at Lower Bucks Hospital are discussed. Generally, the inputs are basic data about patients including their health history, current health conditions, and other forms of medical prescriptions and diagnoses that are taken on them. Because the essence of the NIS is to ensure that nurses and other service providers of the patient readily have access to information about the patient, it is always important that information fed into the NIS are as thorough as possible. Due to the large size of Lower Bucks Hospital, which has 180 beds with more than 400 physicians and over 1,400 employees and volunteers, the throughput of the NIS has been so large that it can handle not less than 2.0 Terabits of data. Depending on the amount of processing of data that takes place, the output of data is always equal to the data input (Bushman, 2007). The data cycle of the NIS thus makes it one of the few Advanced Data Systems (ADS) used in Bristol, PA.

Housing of Data

The Nursing Information System at Lower Bucks Hospital has a central unit where data is housed for onward distribution. The central unit is referred to as a workstation at Lower Bucks Hospital (Lower Bucks Hospital, 2012). Indeed, it is this aspect of the NIS that makes it directly integrated with the electronic medical records because once is housed in the workstation, the data is processed within the data for onward distribution to all other departments and mini-systems available. What this means is that data is networked across an array of systems that make data more accessible to the entire health facility rather than confined. The existence of the workstation makes the data cycle, which is made up of input – processing – storage – output highly effective. This is because data on patients are collected from different units of the hospital including inpatient nursing unit, pharmacy, and consulting, and all these data are processed in the NIS for storage and further usage by stakeholders in the care of the patient.

Entry of Data

The NIS works as an integrated system, collecting data from different units and departments of the hospital into the workstation. Data is therefore entered by any person on duty within the inpatient ward, pharmacy, accounts, consulting, and surgery departments in the department’s own system for onward input into the ADS at the workstation. The only regulation is that there cannot be cross-departmental entry or editing of data though there can be cross-departmental access to data. What this means is that those at the pharmacy department for instance cannot enter data at the nursing section though they can access data from the nursing section to base on the data to take their internal decisions.

The integrity of the data

In the present situation where the system is networked and data is accessible across the board, it is possible for someone to argue that the integrity of data cannot be ensured because data can be tampered with to destroy its value and worth. But as it has been explained earlier, the system does not allow primary data coming from a source to be tampered with in any way by another source. This is the major means by which the integrity of data is ensured (Sullivan and Wyatt, 2006).