ESSAY: Healthcare Information Technology Trends

To Prepare:

Reflect on the Resources related to digital information tools and technologies.
Consider your healthcare organization’s use of healthcare technologies to manage and distribute information.
Reflect on current and potential future trends, such as use of social media and mobile applications/telehealth, Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled asset tracking, or expert systems/artificial intelligence, and how they may impact nursing practice and healthcare delivery.

Post a brief description of general healthcare technology trends, particularly related to data/information you have observed in use in your healthcare organization or nursing practice. Describe any potential challenges or risks that may be inherent in the technologies associated with these trends you described. Then, describe at least one potential benefit and one potential risk associated with data safety, legislation, and patient care for the technologies you described. Next, explain which healthcare technology trends you believe are most promising for impacting healthcare technology in nursing practice and explain why. Describe whether this promise will contribute to improvements in patient care outcomes, efficiencies, or data management. Be specific and provide examples.

ANSWER

Healthcare Information Technology Trend

Technology continues to revolutionize how myriads of issues surrounding healthcare are addressed. The desire to improve the safety of patient data and general information about healthcare has even led to more technological innovations. There continues to be a total transformation from handling patient data manually to digital by the use of an electronic health record system. The EHR system is meant to be fully optimized such that it is responsive to the needs of clinicians consequently having an impact on the delivery of quality care (Gagnon et al., 2016). There is also the possibility of the use of artificial intelligence to patient information collected through various digital platforms such as the EHR. AI is also meant to solve some of the most problematic healthcare challenges through computer systems. Data generated can be easily and quickly interpreted after a diagnosis has been made. The use of AI may run the risk of being wrong hence resulting to other patient-related complications. For instance, if the AI system is used and it generated the wrong diagnosis, the consequence is that there will be a wrong prescription. This can also be the case when it fails to locate a tumour when indeed it exists. A lawsuit may easily arise…