Explore how knowledge is generated in information science.
Objectives
Introduction This chapter explores information, information systems (ISs), and infor mation science as one of the building blocks of informatics. (Refer to Figure 2-1.) The key word here, of course, is information. Information and information processing are central to the work of health care. A healthcare professional is known as a knowledge worker because he or she deals with and processes information on a daily basis to make it meaningful and inform his or her practice.
Healthcare information is complex, and many concerns and issues arise with healthcare information, such as ownership, access, disclosure, exchange, security, privacy, disposal, and dissemination. The widespread implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) has promoted collabora tion among public and privatesector stakeholders on a wideranging va riety of healthcare information solutions. Some of these initiatives include Health Level Seven (HL7), the eGov initiative by Consolidated Health Informat- ics (CHI), the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII), the National Health Information Network (NHIN), Next-Generation Internet (NGI), Internet2, and iHealth record. There are also health information exchange (HIE) systems, such as Connecting for Health, the eHealth initiative, the Federal Health Information Exchange (FHIE), the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC), the New England Health EDI Network (NEHEN), the State of New Mexico Rapid Syndromic Validation Project (RSVP), the Southeast Michigan ePrescribing Initiative, and the Tennessee Volunteer eHealth Initiative (Goldstein, Groen, Ponkshe, & Wine, 2007). Many of these were sparked by the HITECH Act of 2011, which set the 2014 deadline for implementing EHRs and provided the impetus for HIE initiatives.
It is quite evident from the previous brief listing that there is a need to remedy healthcare information technology (IT) concerns, challenges, and issues faced today. One of the main issues deals with how healthcare infor mation is managed to make it meaningful. It is important to understand
Introduction to Information, Information Science, and Information Systems Kathleen Mastrian and Dee McGonigle