Info 202 F12

Article Summary

Everyone agrees that electronic medical information system will benefit billions of people; however, the implementation of this system is not easy as it seemed at first. The problems on the implementation are such as interoperability within a system, security and reliability concerns on the sensitive health information, and the critical nature of health data that a failure can result even a death. 

These days everything seems to go digital/electronic. Since the health care, or the medical information, is rich and can be huge in data volume, so it is on its way to go digital. However, there are a lot of barriers to work this out and I found it to be a snap shot of a tension between human vs. computer. 

Doctors and practitioners are complaining to moving from paper to screen since they have been working with papers for years. Protected by their horrible hand writing, the medical profession certainly had their own culture which causes the information inequality between health service provider and consumer. In this case, the electronic system will benefit more on the side of patients because the electronic system lets them access their own information easily. This is a good thing for the larger population, but there are drawbacks that we, the information architects to conquer. 

Like the financial data, the health information is very sensitive, but on top of that, the health data is a lot more critical. A simple mistake can cause a life. Triple or more back-up system should be built with the highest level of security. The system shouldn't be out or breached in any case. On this matter, this medical system is different from other systems. Who is going to be responsible? The provider software/systems want to bail out from this responsibility just like other systems telling it depends on its user. The users, health practitioners, however, will blame at this new black box which hinder them to be the most efficient (doubling documenting time etc). Is the black box, or the new medical information system really neutral and smart enough to give advices to treat people?

Interoperability is one thing that we encounter throughout this course too. In the context of metadata of a person/patient, different fields/departments used different vocabulary for the same thing and categorize/classify it in a different manner. The info structure built for the physicians are different from the one for the pharmacy or else. For the future, if the structure could achieve extra-operability(between different hospitals) it will be great. Will the standardized structure ever be possible, if then, who can build the one for everyone?