Rajesh Kumar Sinha

Attitude of Ayurveda doctors toward the impact of health information technology

Background: Health information technology (HIT) equips healthcare professionals with the required information and tools for making quality decisions in patient care, but it is always advisable to assess their attitude before its actual implementation. Objectives: To assess the attitude of Ayurvedic doctors toward the impact of HIT. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional survey was carried out among 140 doctors of an Ayurvedic center of Southern India. A validated questionnaire consisting of 18 questions based on a 5-point Likert scale was administered to the participants after receiving their due consent. Results: About 75-80% of the respondents concurred that the HIT application, such as electronic health record, has the potentials to reduce the duplication of documentation work, is easy and has an instant processing and real-time access to patient information. They also felt the need of such application to report the patient data to local and national health institutions. A total of 85% of them mentioned that these applications can make the collection and accessibility of patient data much easier compared with paper-based records, whereas 87.4% of them claimed telemedicine as a platform for multidisciplinary collaborative research and patient care. Conclusion: Even though most of the respondents agreed about the role of HIT in improving the quality of health care, there were many who held no opinion about HIT, including privacy and security of patient data. The need of proper awareness and training program is identified to make them aware about the HIT and its application in patient care, education and research.

Understanding the need for a Non-invasive wearable Real-time database device for diabetic patients

Diabetes occurs when the pancreas in the human body does not secrete sufficient insulin. It is a disease that is growing rapidly and affecting many lives. Hence, it needs constant monitoring. Wearable devices are those devices that are present on your person at all times. If the monitoring of this disease could be paired with wearable devices along with enabling real-time documentation in the patients’ medical records, it would benefit both the caregivers and the patients by saving time, money, effort and the amount of work put in by both during the health care process, hence, aiding in the delivery of quality health care. This article deals with identifying the existing wearable devices in detecting diabetes or risk of diabetes non-invasively and further scope of research in the respective area.

Cloud Enabled Standard Electronic Health Record Architecture for Indian Healthcare Sector

The current health care system in India has a three-tier structure for delivering health care services to different strata of society. Individual patient health information is scattered across many levels of the health care system in which consistent data availability at the point of care is very much essential. Currently, many healthcare sectors use hospital-centric approach to maintain and manage hospital information in which patient health information cannot be shared with another hospital at the point of care. In this work, a cloud-enabled standard Electronic Health Record (EHR) architecture is proposed, which uses the patient-centric approach in which distributed patient health records are made available in an integrated and unified manner at the point of care. Health data recording and reporting are done using standard codings such as SNOMED-CT, LOINC, DICOM and NDC. For unique identification of patient in different levels of health care system EHR system is linked with Aadhaar which enables portability of patient and gives easy access to the patient health records in local, regional and national level database. Also, Security Assertion Markup Language-Single Sign On(SAML-SSO) authentication model is adopted to access multiple services of health information after signing in once which improves the security and increase the access speed of the health information service.

Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Health Information System

Primary health centres (PHCs) serve as the first line of defence against illness and diseases, where health information system (HIS) assists the professionals working at these centres in collecting, analyzing and ensuring the overall quality of data for all health-related decision-making. The study was conducted with an objective to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of HIS among the staff of PHCs of a district of an eastern state of India The study was conducted among 205 professionals including doctors, nurses, auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs), pharmacists and clerks of 23 PHCs. A validated and pre-tested structured questionnaire was used for the study. The frequency and cumulative score was calculated using MS Excel. The study result shows that the average cumulative knowledge, practice and attitude indicator of PHCs of the district as 6.7, 6.4 and 8.7, respectively. The average infrastructure index of PHC was 0.93, and 21.73 per cent of PHCs of the district were below the average value with all indicators. As the average values for the knowledge, practice and attitude indicators were found to be low with respect to most of the parameters; the need identified was to make the clinical and non-clinical staff more aware about the HIS.

Assessment of Oncology Medical Records as per NABH Standards

Background: A complete, accurate, adequate and timely medical documentation helps in reducing medical errors and serves as important medical–legal evidence. Objective: To evaluate Oncology Medical Records based on the National Accreditation Board of Hospitals Information Management System (NABH.IMS) and Patient Rights and Education (NABH.PRE) standards. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted to assess the policies and procedures in relation to medical documentation against NABH.IMS 1–7 standards and NABH.PRE-3 Standards. A total of 520 discharged inpatient records were analyzed to understand the quality of medical documentation in practice. Results: The existing policies and procedures were found to be compliant with NABH.IMS and NABH.PRE standards. The analysis of medical records showed maximum compliance in Nurse’s records, Doctor’s order forms, Anaesthesia reports of Breast and Head & Neck Cancer and Radiotherapy Charts in Cervical Cancer. Conclusion: Overall documentation was found to be satisfactory as per the standards set by NABH. The study results revealed that the attention to compulsorily document patient clinical data in the respective forms of the medical records will enhance the completeness and accuracy of medical documentation of the hospital.

Development of a Model Hospital-based Cancer Registry Database for Better Healthcare Reporting

Hospital based cancer registries work with the objective to support healthcare professionals and managers at all level with complete, accurate and adequate information for treatment planning, epidemiological investigations, prevention and control of cancer. This paper deals with the design, development and implementation of a computerized hospital based cancer registry database to assist the healthcare providers with a simplified solution in easy documentation and instant access of health information of patients with cancer for care planning, research, education, and national cancer registry reporting.