Health Care

Healthcare may be viewed as just another product or service to be purchased by an entity by means of a monetary perception. A healthcare system is the organization by which an individual's health care is provided.

Characteristics of Health Care:

• The provision of critical healthcare treatment is often regarded as a basic human right.
• Healthcare professionals are obligated by their oaths of service to provide lifesaving treatment.
• Consumers often lack the information or understanding to be able to rationally choose between alternative healthcare providers when they need treatment, particularly in urgent treatment.
• Healthcare systems models are purely private enterprise healthcare systems that are comparatively rare.

Goals and models of Healthcare:

Getting more quality, information and election of healthcare professionals for the user and getting more protection for as many people with lower costs are the goals of healthcare. Coming to the models, social security healthcare model, publicly funded healthcare model are the major models of a health care and they are known as public insurance systems. In almost every country with a government health care system a parallel private system is allowed to operate, this is sometimes referred to as two-tier health care and pride is widespread in their one-tier system of only government provided healthcare of Canada.

Medical Informatics:

Application of information technology to healthcare is known as Medical Informatics. It is defined as the “Understanding, skills and tools that facilitate the allocation and use of information to deliver healthcare and promote health". Medical informatics is known as health informatics or biomedical informatics. These later-generation terms imitate the substantive donation of the citizen & non-medical professions to the cohort and usage of healthcare data and related information.

Aspects:

• Architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research.
• Decision support systems in healthcare
• Messaging standards for the exchange of information between health care information systems.
• Controlled medical vocabularies such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) or Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers.
• Use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making

HIPAA:

HIPAA stands for American Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and is defined as a set of rules to be followed by health plans, doctors, hospitals and other health care providers. Key provisions that are added in HIPAA are:

• Patients must be able access their record and correct errors
• Patients must be informed of how their personal information will be used.
• Patient information can only be shared if needed to treat the patient. In particular, it cannot be used for marketing purposes without their explicit consent.
• Patients can ask their health plans and providers to take reasonable steps to ensure that their communications with the patient are confidential. For instance, a patient can ask to be called on his work number, instead of home or cell phone number.
• Patients can file formal privacy-related complaints to the HHS' Office for Civil Rights.
• Health plans or providers must document their privacy procedures, but they have a lot of freedom on what to include in their privacy procedure.
• Health plans or providers must designate a privacy officer and train their employees.
• Health plans and providers must use standard formats for electronic data interchange, such as electronic claims submission EDI.