Health Informatics Specialists

Have you ever heard of cases where a patient goes into the hospital with one illness and comes out with a completely different one? Things like that happen to hundreds of people every day because they receive certain treatments and medications that aren't suited to their health condition. A doctor might give you a medication that interacts badly with another one you've been taking regularly for a while, which could cause health problems. You might also have an allergy to a specific ingredient in that medication without knowing it, or that information might exist in your old medical records, but you've forgotten or lost those documents and no longer have them with you. You might also end up in the hospital unconscious because of an accident, unable to tell doctors what medications you're on, which could conflict with the medications and treatments you're about to receive. All these things cause health disasters for millions of patients around the world. To avoid these problems, something called "electronic medical records" was invented, to store all the health data related to a patient from birth and throughout their life, and these records have now become accessible to medical institutions in different countries. These records are essentially a medical electronic platform with a personal account for every citizen, where their medical condition data is recorded in real time — meaning that if you visit a doctor at any hospital, they'll record your condition, the tests you've had and their results, the medications prescribed, and everything related to you in the database linked to you in these electronic records. And if you happen to visit a different hospital in the future, the doctors there will be able to track your data on that platform and know your medical history, which makes diagnosis and treatment easier and helps avoid giving you any medications unsuited to you or that conflict with others. These electronic medical records fall, within hospitals and institutions, under a specific department called "health informatics," staffed by specialists with extensive experience in both healthcare and computer science, called "health informatics specialists." They're responsible for collecting and recording patient data, storing it in these records, and continuously reviewing it, as well as fixing and maintaining any glitches in the software and technological systems that run the electronic medical records. But the role of health informatics specialists doesn't stop there — they also conduct in-depth analysis of that data to uncover hidden patterns, which might reveal, for example, that patients in a specific hospital ward have started developing a certain illness after being there for a certain period, indicating an infection, or that residents of a certain city are showing similar symptoms, which could reveal an outbreak.

Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa