Who does the EHR belong to?

I have to believe that my Electronic Health Record belongs to me.  At least the information held within it belongs to me.  The computers and the system that organizes and manipulates the date may belong to some one else.  However, it is my personal information held within.  The EHR is a way for people in a health system or insurance system to be able to easily utilize my information.  Their systems utilize my information.  Because of the nature of the personal information others keep filed, the governement has put laws into place such as HIPPA to keep my information from being mishandled or shared with people who have no business knowing my business.  These laws allow me to decide who can use, view, andor store my information.

Add a comment October 22, 2009

My first blog!

So for my first blog I am suppose to expalin what healthcare informatics is and what I have learned in class.  I have certainly learned plenty for one week of class.  I set up a twitter acount and am learning to tweet.  Totally knew concept for me.  And I now have a blog account.  Who would have thought it.  I am not sure that anyone wants to know what I think but we’ll see how it goes.  I feel so technologically involved now.  Honestly, my past accomplishment in this high tech world was learning to reach friends and family on facebook.  I suppose you could say I am not up to date with all the things that can be done in our world with a computer.

Now as far as health care informatics are concerned, I also learned a truck load.  I did a simple search and found way more hits than I really wanted to.  I even learned that there are universities that have entire degree programs in healthcare informatics.  How did I not know more about this?  In short informatics is about integrating technology into health care and how we provide care and services to our patients.  It’s everything I learned to use at work but never understood fell into this category.  It’s the programs we use to pass meds, to look up drug information, disease information, patient teaching, etc.  It is the program that we now use to chart, the computers that store all our patient information.  It is huge and I never saw how it impacted my world!  I feel like a bird with my head in the sand.

Add a comment October 15, 2009