Healthcare Information Management in the Era of Information Technology

Doctor looking through Records

Where I come from, and as I was growing up, I remember clearly that there was a dream that many parents shared: to see their children growing to become doctors. Of course, lawyers were equally popular among most parents’ dreams: which parent wouldn’t have dreamed to see his or her precious child graduating law school? Not many, I can assure you of that! Nevertheless, becoming a doctor was probably even more prestigious. Doctors were always seen (and I don’t think that this will ever dramatically change) as prominent members of the society. Unless robots take over one day in the very remote future, doctors will still be around, offering their services to their fellow citizens and whoever needs them.

Societies are not something fixed, though; as a matter of fact, they are constantly changing. Nowadays, with the emergence of information society, there is a profession that rapidly gained popularity. Healthcare Information Professionals (HIM) are altering the professional landscape of the world of medicine, responding to the present needs of developed societies.

The meteoric rise of the role of information management nowadays, paralleled by the sudden death of the era when professionals had to deal with paper records stored in desks and folders, have created the need for specialized professionals in data and records management in all professional fields. In hospitals, HIM professionals are becoming more and more necessary, as the way we understand medicine and the treatment of patients is also rapidly transforming.

Inventory and intelligent data management

Data management doesn’t concern only the specialized companies that are dealing with information management and storage. On the contrary, in every professional field the need for more efficient use of data is urgent. Today, the use of data in order to optimize healthcare for patients is as urgent as it has never been before. Therefore, the whole essence of what is the role of a HIM professional has totally changed.

Education is also affected by these developments. Universities that offer health information management degree programs are focusing more and more on data analysis and research, today more than ever before. Students receive training in computer software programs to analyze data. Generally speaking, it becomes more and more obvious that in our times any professional must have basic knowledge of computer programming and must acquire the necessary skills for a job office that is getting much more complicated than it used to be. If you ask the elder in the profession how it used to be decades ago, you will hear stories of a remote era. Along with the technological advancement even the job realities changed and we definitely have to keep up the pace, even enjoy the benefits of what it’s being offered in terms of improved services and efficiency.

A direct consequence of the increasing importance of information technology in the field of healthcare information management is the larger number of men to be hired in a previously female-dominated profession. What is more, and according to the experts in the field, what is becoming more evident as time passes is that all HIM professionals must be ready to adapt relatively fast to new challenges and that they must keep an open eye to the rapid and continuous changes in their professional field.

As for the future, AHIMA (American Health Information Management Association) is already planning and trying to explore new possibilities. One idea is supposedly to try to organize the HIM profession in a large collaborative project, where professionals are working together in the way that NASA’s Mission Control Center operates. The leading figures in the field also agree that a higher level of education must be pursued by the HIM professionals, an education that must include information governance skills and knowledge as well.

Sure, the world is changing. Sometimes we feel glad about it, but occasionally we get stressed trying to keep up with the… changes! One thing is for certain, though: nowadays, education is a lifelong project and everyone must remember Solon, the wise ancient Greek, who once said… “as I grow older, I constantly learn more”… Maybe parents should learn that being a doctor is not the only prestigious profession in the field anymore and that being a healthcare information manager is just as demanding.

The Importance of Archiving Data

Memories

When I was young I used to collect all sorts of things: cd’s with my favorite music, magazine articles for things that interested me, coins, DVD’s, gadgets from my holiday’s destinations and even matchboxes for a short while. The reason is obvious: it was the simple desire to store and preserve everything that made me happy or brought to me good memories from the past. Well, it is a habit I kind of miss since I grew up a little bit. I remember the joy and the feeling of satisfaction every time I felt like updating or even checking on one of my boyish collections. It was a true feeling of joy!

What does it mean to grow up? Well, it means that the necessities of life knock at your door at some time (along with the pleasures of the adult life that is). A necessity of adult life couldn’t be other than the need to gather and preserve data that concern your professional life. You might need to do it by yourself if you are an accountant that works from home. Or, you might need to do it for your company if you’re one of the lucky ones that has his own office downtown (in the times of high rates of unemployment around Europe, yes, this is what I call luck!).

Archiving Data

How many times a company had to face devastating results in the light of a mismanagement of its data? I guess it must be many! Nowadays especially, the need of a company to store its data in an appropriate way it’s not only a necessity directed from the need to operate smoothly and efficiently but it is also a matter of stricter regulations and policies concerning data management and archive storage. E.U. recent regulations have generated heated discussions concerning the issue. Nevertheless, what matters in this case is not how things should have been but how one can adjust to new realities.

Guinness World Record/Shred Day DFW 2012

Iron Mountain provides excellent services for document storage. The company simply gathers the documents and stores them to their off-site storage facilities. Web services offered by the company provide an easy and quick access to your archive. What is more, you can label, search and of course request a retrieval of documents at any time. Iron Mountain has over 1.000 storage facilities around the world and has been operating on the field since 1951. Now, this is what I call a safe choice if you want to guarantee business continuity for your own company!

Apart from storing data and information though, there is also another necessity. It consists of the simple fact that some data, some information, needs to be destroyed. And this is another sensitive issue that has been thoroughly discussed by everyone concerned: individuals, companies, institutions and governmental agencies. It goes like this: some information is valuable (it could costs millions sometimes!) and some other is simply, from a point onward, confidential waste, meaning simply waste. And these are confidential waste that a company must get rid of.

Interactive Kiosks

In addition, by being waste it means that you need to make proper use of them! The world we live in faces a problem, we all know it: it is the single most crucial problem this planet faces and will need to face in the future and it’s the ecological one. I will put it bluntly: if we want to imagine that sometime from now in the future normal life will still go on than we really need to start protecting the environment. In other words, your confidential waste must become recycling material and obviously this is a job that needs to be handled professionally.

Businesswoman signing the contract.

Many companies choose to outsource the job of destroying their data in order to keep up with data destruction requirements and ecological concerns. Usually, they are provided with locked consoles which are emptied on a regular basis by the external company’s stuff. The waste will be 100% recycled. In addition, a small company that wishes to avoid signing a contract, it can request on-demand shredding services by another company. That means that they can use their services whenever is needed as a small company probably doesn’t need to deal with huge amount of information and confidential waste that is.

This whole issue is all about responsibility and transparency in case you didn’t get it. I only hope that most companies will comply with all of the the rules and regulations…

The Art of Preservation

Hollywood also needs its preservation expert

Classy photographs of Hollywood stars and old Film equipments

We live in an era when the right to joy and entertainment nearly equals other rights, such as that right to the pursuit of happiness, for instance.  Especially during the last decades, and at least in the Western world, everyone seems to be very concerned with this need, urge and desire for a little bit more entertainment. It is as if most of us are pursuing our happiness in some dream-like worlds, settings and contexts revealed and offered to us by the means of entertainment. Even if ephemeral, they do trigger our wildest imagination and inspire us, getting our energy level up, even if for a little while. It might be only natural, since , honestly speaking, not all of us people have  the resources or opportunity to go on the pursuit of happiness  for real and for granted, with many chances of getting there and also decreased risks of losing it on the way.

Given the situation, no wonder everything seems to be more pleasurable today. Did you ever take a look at Google’s offices around the world for example? If so, you must have gotten that feeling that those people in there are having fun most of the time instead of actually working hard! Or that those are the offices of the future just as well, for the sake of the health and well being of those spending most of their time in their workplace.  Indeed, it was in the 1960’s when people – citizens of this world – demanded “play” and “joy” to be universal rights. Therefore, even at work one shouldn’t be deprived of the right to play, enjoy and have some fun…

Based on the aforementioned, the world of entertainment grew till it became huge – larger than life, one might argue.  It is one of the biggest and most profitable industries worldwide. People in the U.S. or in Europe tend to ask for more and more cultural products, giving this impression that they simply can’t have enough! It’s never enough also due to the fact that technology has made things much more exciting.

Nothing is static nowadays and there is always something new around, even when you might have thought that you had had enough… Take the movie industry, for example: the introduction of 3D technology came at the moment when many viewers had already started to prefer their home cinema over the big screen. After the release of the first blockbusters in 3D, I don’t think that many would choose to watch Iron Man 3 at home! Of course, there is always this option of purchasing a 3D television set for the living room; however, it still does not equal the pleasure derived by the higher 3D technology used in a cinema hall.

Iron Mountain – Storing and Managing Entertainment assets

Talking about entertainment, I simply cannot imagine our modern lives without Hollywood. Because Hollywood, only by its name being echoed, actually, signifies the Eldorado of world entertainment!  It is there, in California, where the heart of popular entertainment is endlessly pumping. And for this heart to go on, we also need the ideal means of preserving all of those enjoyable little treasures.

This is when the specialists in safeguarding the product of our work come into the picture. Iron Mountain Entertainment Services are the world’s single largest center on film, sound, and digital preservation services. In case you were wondering what Universal Studios, Sony, Corbis, Universal Music Group and Paramount Pictures might have in common, other than producing and distributing tons of cultural products for our eyes only, well, then here is your answer: they all trust Iron Mountain’s valuable services. This leading company world-wide when it comes to data protection or information and records management among other services, hosts safely around 22 million elements produced and owned by over 1.200 media and entertainment companies.

 Video about Iron Mountain in Virginia including the Corbis Bettmann Archive File Preservation Facility.

Their services are complete and complex and include analog to digital transfer, real-time film viewing and videotape cleaning, among many other much needed services in the industry.  Not to forget their 2 petabyte (PB) online Digital Content Repository, where companies can store and retrieve their digital material! It is hosted at the now enlarged Iron Mountain’s Digital Studios in… Hollywood. Where else could they have been than in Hollywood!?

So here you have it: as long as this world is driven by information and informational material (which is what the entertainment industry is actually using and constantly producing), we will also need a preservation expert. We need someone that can guarantee to us that nothing will be lost, since we live in an era when information is crucial, but also sensitive and vulnerable.  If you have ever lost even a small movies collection that you might have gathered on your computer because of a minor error or because the system crashed, you might then know what I mean …