As a registered nurse, Jean Frazier has worked in labor and delivery for eight years. Now, she is helping deliver a new era in healthcare – information technology.
“My initial passion for being an RN was assisting women through the labor and delivery process – you’re supporting someone and making the process as easy and pleasant as possible,” she said. “That’s still my focus. I want to help the transition to information technology in healthcare be as easy and efficient as possible and make our healthcare systems even safer and more pleasant for the patients.”
When a patient visits the hospital, the staff creates a detailed medical report. Whether the condition is severe – such as a heart attack or broken arm – or a routine check-up, the patient’s details are documented. This medical record also contains all the physician’s notes, X-rays, lab results, recommended treatment plans and current medications. Historically, these records have been paper-based, but that is quickly changing.
Job prospects for the health information technology industry should be very good, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are expected to grow faster than average. When Frazier moved to San Diego six years ago to work as an RN at UC San Diego Medical Center, she helped the other nurses at that hospital get up to speed on the new bar coding technology for medications.
“Every time you introduce something new to a hospital, like technology, it can be challenging because the nurses feel overworked, and they often feel they don’t have the support they need,” Frazier said.
Frazier decided the only way she could effectively ease nurses and physicians into the digital age was to learn more about information technology. That’s when she enrolled in teh UC San Diego Extension Healthcare IT program, which examines the impact of healthcare IT on different healthcare environments and organizations and the national implications of effective implementation.
“We received an overview of the healthcare system in a way I had never learned as a bedside nurse, like content management systems, how billing works and how IT fits into the hospital,” Fraizer said about the Extension program. “We also learned about networking and computers and the different applications being used in healthcare, as well as how national policy impacts healthcare IT.
In the past, paper-based medical records made reports cumbersome to access. Information could not be easily shared, and files could be misplaced or lost. Yet, this was the medical filing system for millions of patients across the U.S.
Due to government initiatives in recent years, the healthcare industry adopted an advanced technology system for managing and utilizing health information. With this national initiative, medical establishments have the goal of transferring all healthcare information to an advanced database system within the next decade. This is fueling a demand for health information technicians who can support medical record reform.
As technology increases, so does the need for qualified health information technicians to manage confidential patient data. Electronic health records (EHR) will continue to expand to include patient information from various sources (eventually integrating text, voice, images and handwritten notes).
Technicians are needed for emerging jobs such as healthcare integration engineer, healthcare systems analyst, clinical IT consultant, and technology support specialist. Jobs and needs in the healthcare information technology field are a critical component of plans for positive change in the healthcare industry.
Frazier, who completed the Extension certificate in March 2010, recently started a new job using her newfound healthcare IT skills. As a senior specialist in evidence-based medicine at Sharp Healthcare, she acts as a liason between the hospital’s IT department and teh clinicians, and helps transfer medical records to digital format.
Frazier said information technology not only improves efficiency for hospitals but it also increases safety for patients.
“With electronic medical records I can now easily and quickly read what a physician has entered in teh computer about a patient instead of needing to spend time clarifying what they have hand-written,” she said. “With technology, like bar coding, where you can scan teh barcodes to cross reference a patient’s wristband with their medications, you can cut down on potential errors of giving that patient the wrong medications.”
“There are also reminders we can set in the programs that pop up on a computer that tell us when a patient is due for a wellness or follow-up exam,” she added. “Before, we had to sort through paper records. Information technology gives us a much more efficient way to know about and follow the care of a patient.”
Whil Frazier hasn’t been in her new job long, she is already hopeful for her future career and for the future of the heathcare industry as it embraces information technology as the standard way of patient care.
Article by Andra Siedsma
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