How Healthcare Organizations Can Use Informatics to Enhance Care

To satisfy regulatory requirements, healthcare organizations must store patient data digitally in the form of electronic health records or electronic medical records. As noted in the journal Heredity, moving beyond simple storage to the actionable application of Big Data offers “significant potential” for healthcare, but significant challenges remain.

Among the most common are data fragmentation, high costs and increased complexity siloed data that’s difficult to access limits the efficacy of EMR and EHR solutions. Healthcare informatics provides a way to overcome these challenges, as long as organizations adopt the right approach and deploy the right technology. ISACA advisor and media spokesperson Neil Lappage notes that “if you ask 10 different people about healthcare informatics, you’ll get 10 different answers.” That makes sense as a burgeoning field, informatics is driven by both technology adoption at an organizational level and the integration of these solutions into healthcare workflows for frontline staff.