The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has for a long time now supported the development of medical informatics within the healthcare sector. Research into medical informatics mostly deals with efficiently organizing, managing, analyzing and validating information in healthcare.
Many clinicians have to make use of both old and new knowledge concerning their patients. They have to remember each patient’s individual health status and background. Next to this they have to clearly communicate this with patients, doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, and all of this on their respective level of understanding.
Meeting these expectations is often extremely difficult. Not only because of the massive workload given to one individual, but also because of a lack of systems that specialize in organizing, storing and retrieving medical patient data in a clear and efficient way. Today’s powerful computer systems and information management tools can greatly help with providing a more sustainable working environment for many healthcare professionals.
A more detailed description on how this will be achieved by making use of computer systems and applications can be found in issue 6 of the Research in Action online journal by the AHRQ.