The impact of informatics on the

delivery of healthcare
Introduction
This report will be focusing on the impact of informatics on the delivery of healthcare at the point of
care. In order to have broadened opinions and views on this topic, two different specialties will be
compared; which involves both general practice and pharmacy. This report will also describe the
effectiveness of the implementation, benefits and costs of informatics in health care during
consultation. To prevent information bias, more than one country has been taken into consideration
which includes the United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands and others.
What is informatics?
The definition of informatics in this report has been derived from various given definitions (1) (2).
Informatics in the context of health care therefore will be defined as improving the quality of care
given to and received by patient with the aid of information technology. This improvement will be
inforced by reviewing how information technology is applied to various aspect of patient care which
could be for example during consultation which will be the focus of this report. Consultation can be
carried in various forms which could be in form of physical contact or a telephone consultation.
These two forms of consultation will be considered in this report.
The use of informatics in the delivery of
healthcare
One of the problems that deal with patient care is the increase need of mobility of patient records
between various care providers (3). In other to solve this problem and provide adequate care for
patient and ease the pressure on their care providers, the use of computerized system was
introduced. Computers were first introduced to general practice about thirty years ago and about
twenty-five years ago to pharmacies (4) (5). Having access to a computer in a general practice and a
pharmacy therefore pave a way to the implementation of computerization of patient records.
In a general practice, one of the ways in which computerization of patient records has been used is
the introduction of the computerized patient record system (CPR). The CPR is an electronic patient
record system that replaces the existing paper based patient records; this electronic record is
expected to contain useful information. The information could be demographical data, previous and
current medical histories and treatments (6). During consultation, the CPR will be use to aggregate
data from the interaction between the physician and his/her patient.
While in a pharmacy, the computerization of patient records led to the introduction of pharmacy
system which is not just used to collect information about the patients, the pharmacy system is more
of a protection and error checking tool. This tool could be in form of a database (5), which helps in
checking for any drug allergies, drug interactions between prescribed medication and also to alert
the pharmacist while dispensing the drug of a suspected error in the prescribed medication; for
example (7) instead of 10mg drug being given to the patient a 100mg has been entered into the
system by mistake.
Relationships tend to occur between these two specialties, when providing care for patient.
Therefore the use of computerized patient records in both specialties has shown how the
departments could relate with each other when it comes to patient care; for example the use of
computerized patient record system would allow the GP and the pharmacist to share information
about the patient between each other which could be previous prescription of the patient or the
reminder of repeated prescription. Although the CPR and the pharmacy system is an electronic
system, there is also other component that is involved in the process of patient information being
recorded on the system. This component is the use of classification methodology which includes the
use of (6) read codes, ICD-10 and ATC.
The Read codes (8) are clinical vocabularies used by the General Practitioners to record patients
electronic based records. The codes also improve the way patient records are communicated
between different specialty departments. Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) (9) is a
classification system for defining the daily dose of drugs. This classification has been in use for over
30 years and it is used by both the pharmacist and general practitioner. International Classification of
Diseases edition 10 (ICD-10) (10) is the international standard diagnostic classification used in
classifying diseases and other health problems when recording on patient electronic health record.