Getting to Know Information Systems

A computerized information system (IS) is a group of components that collect, process, store, and communicate information. The IS contains a database to store the information it collects and uses instructions stored in the database to process data. An example of an IS in a hospital is the electronic medical record (EMR) IS. The purpose of the EMR IS is to collect patient medical records, store these records, process queries to access the records, and communicate the records to another system upon request.

Other information systems in the hospital work the same way. They collect, store, process, and communicate data to and from other information systems in the hospital. Hospitals have standard departments, and these departments each have an IS. There is an IS for the lab, radiology, surgery, and pharmacy. These four information systems are classified as clinical information systems (CIS) because each is an IS that directly relates to the medical care of a patient. The primary IS that centralizes patient data while a patient is admitted is called the hospital IS (HIS). Hospitals might use other, smaller information systems that support other ancillary clinical departments such as dietary or respiratory. The smaller systems are usually supported by the vendor and not the HIT department. Other information systems in the hospital work to manage the administrative side of hospital functions. This includes an IS for time management for hourly paid staff, billing, medical coding, or scheduling.

As a member of the IT staff at a hospital, you are responsible for understanding the flow of data at your hospital. This is true if you are the IT director, project manager, implementation analyst, or technician. You must know where the data needs to be to make it useful to patient care. It’s easier to understand the HIT data flow if you know where the patient is in the hospital. For example, if a patient needs an MRI in the Radiology department, that patient’s information needs to go into the radiology information system (RIS). Makes sense, right?

Each IS is a bit unique and is not exactly the same at every hospital. Many vendors have developed their own solutions for an information system or systems. Each solution is unique and functions differently even though multiple solutions might work for the same purpose and all share common goals in patient care. For example, one vendor’s user interface looks nothing like the user interface of another vendor, yet both serve as the RIS. Some solutions have many different systems networked together, and others have all functions of the entire hospital housed in the same system. Hospitals customize vendor products, so even within a product from the same vendor, two hospitals won’t be configured the same. Hospitals pick and choose if they want the HIS to handle all IS operations or if they want to use subsystems for more options offered by specialized systems.

When you are on the HIT staff, you should create a data flow diagram for your particular hospital. You can use this graphic many times as you troubleshoot where a breakdown occurs, as you explain to users why they don’t see what they expect, or as you program data to go where it needs to go.