How does health informatics impact individuals?
One way is that the medical office of the future is probably going to be very different than it has been in the past. When a patient enters the office, he will swipe his medical card or use his thumb print, which will pull up a complete medical history. And then, rather than going in and seeing a doctor, the patient will be handed a PDA and asked to answer a series of health questionnaires that have been chosen for them based on the information in their medical records. The computer program will already know that the patient is being monitored for various chronic diseases and, if necessary, will request lab tests be done. The information provided from the survey and the lab tests results will be automatically fed into an expert system which will then provide a report to the doctor to use in a meeting with the patient. So, before the patient even sees a doctor, they will have already collected and used data to figure out what to do next. The doctor’s decisions will be entered into the s
