Question

Reflect on the availability of public health information and informatics and consider the potential use and misuse of the public health information. Reflect on your experiences with health informatics in your personal and professional life.

Are there legal and ethical aspects of public health information systems you have found particularly important? What thoughts do you have on approaches that can be used to ensure proper use of information technology?

For additional details, please refer to the Journal Guidelines and Rubric document.

Answer 1

Answer :

PHI(Public health informatics) use computer and technology in relation to public health(surveillance, prevention, preparedness, and health promotion.) ,the main purpose of health informatics is to deliver the effective health care to patients. Organizations provide useful information for those professionals that want to be more involved in health care, informatics research, biomedical research, including physicians, scientists, researchers, and students. Patient who suffer from chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma, obesity and cardiac conditions have benefited by this management as they can access to a patient portal and monitor their medication usage ,discussions with their doctors for help in making the right healthcare choices. Public health informatics can help control the spread of disease and improve preparedness during an outbreak, such as with the flu or a food-borne illness. Public health organizations also monitor preventive plans , looks for changes in a certain geography or demographic

Sometimes poor user interfaces interfered with the receipt of information and led to errors of commission when making decisions. Clinical errors involving medications were well characterized. Issues with system access, system configuration, and software updates are also reported

The ethical, legal and social issues are observed like patient safety . protection of private patient information ,Research ethics. User involvement and accessibility, Ethical dilemmas resulting from data availability and sharing. Reporting design and data display

The majority of physicians believe that electronic medical records provide a better view of their patients total health which helps them – allowing for better diagnoses while reducing the chance of medical errors but as far we have discussed so many benefits of Public Health informatics ,there is risk of hacking the details and misusing the same. So , great care is to be taken when using the system database ,passwords and sharing other personal information.