A Huge amount of attention and energy spend on research in the health services is directed these days towards creation of what are variously called HIS (Hospital Information systems).
These HIS are associated with ongoing or proposed research efforts with a ritualistic assertion that the "systems approach" should be applied to the designs and processes thus enabling futuristic automated processes for enabling improvement of the quality of care and enhanced monitoring practices.
Many current efforts both by private and public sectors have given emphasis on the same thus reflecting a growing, and desirable, interest in the area of information flow; which can be summarized as the creation, acquisition, storage, and retrieval of pertinent data within health systems for use in medical and administrative decision making. No doubt, earlier times more emphasis was focused on systems configurations and associated hardware components, however now it is being observed that some significant efforts have also being concentrated on computer- aided diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, patient monitoring, medical records, and large-scale community or regional data banks.
Also it may be noted here that contemporary research earlier had been the fragmentary and seemingly uncoordinated approaches to admittedly complex problems of system design and implementation; this has resulted in the duplication of-efforts on some aspects of the problem and the neglect of other aspects. Hardware components and systems configurations are being examined for information-processing capabilities without regard for the total medical and administrative decision framework within which they are to operate. Assumptions are being made as to the specific needs of health services that may ultimately lead to unsuitable or incompatible systems. To this end it appears helpful, for the present, to limit attention largely to hospital information systems; here systems bounds are more clearly definable, research has already produced results that can be evaluated, and overall objectives are more easily discernible. Indeed, many of the notions proposed are generalizable, albeit not without some modifications, to larger and more complex systems.
Dr YATIN TALWAR
