Question

While there are several EHR implementation instances in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia capable of collecting data from individual patients, there is an immense need of integration systems to interlink the EHRs installations to make them interoperable and to generate aggregated data. Explain why the public health professionals are more interested in aggregated data rather than individual data and clarify the importance of these integration and data exchange systems for the field of public health informatics in the

Answer 1

• Aggregate data is used to develop information about group of patients
• It allows health care professionals to identify similar characters of disease, to predict the course of disease, prevention of disease and implement the best way to prevent the disease
• This data is very important in public health. It enables and provides researchers information related to patient safety, prevention and awareness.
• For example- Multiple environmental exposures- 4 categories- Chemical (contaminated water)Radiation ( x-rays), air pollutants (gas), occupational hazards ( Lead). Assesing population exposure distribution allows researchers to define health care outcomes and quantify the association between exposure and response. it also determines number of people affected, duration and severity of condition caused by environmental agent
• aggregated data helps an overall look of the population than focusing only an individual person
• It helps educators and researchers real time data to establish standard information for education and research
• For example- a recent study to assess the effectivenesss of chemotherapy on patients with advanced gastric cancer, clinical trials were conducted for first line chemotherapy patients with gastric cancer receiving medication assistance during their treatment. The results showed that the best survival results were combination of chemotherapy and a three drug regimen containing FU, anthracycline and cysplatin. NB- This research information through aggregated data allowed health care team to learn how to manage patients with gastric cancer effectively
• Overall aggregated data has its own positive aspects
• Many developed countries are also using this data for planning, policy formulation, monitoring, evaluation, disease surveillance, management and research
• Countries of south east asia, western pacific, eastern mediterraninan are using electronic datas. According to WHO, after using aggregated data, their findings are like, majority high income countries are using electronic data