How To Ensure Data Security

Data security is an integral part of the booming healthcare industry

- Baskaran Gopalan

Health information technology is the area of IT that involves the design, development, creation, use and maintenance of information systems for the healthcare sector. In order to improve medical care, lower the costs, increase efficiency, reduce errors and improve patient satisfaction, health IT plays an important role.

The primary purpose of health IT is to ensure better healthcare outcomes for patients. Recording of patient data helps improve treatments and prevention of diseases. But, with the increased use of IT, the need for securing these data is imperative.

Need for IT in healthcare 

IT has become integral to the efforts to optimise costs and effectively manage operations. Technologies help with process management, patient care and management information systems (MIS) in hospitals. With the aim to grow, healthcare requires IT to store and retrieve information to cope with the tremendous pressure.

Integrated electronic medical records facilitate research as data is made available in a structured manner which helps track diseases and even provide the necessary medications. By digitizing patient records, each patient’s blood group, known allergies, etc would be documented and made available at the click of a button, and thus prevent manual errors. Management is easier with IT, from inventory to store, to even laboratory management.

Data analytics in Healthcare 

Players in the healthcare sector generate huge amounts of data everyday and saving it in the form of a hard copy only complicates matters. Hence, different data analytics are used for the better functioning and for future reference.

Electronic Medical Record (EMR): It is used to systematically organise and store the data of a patient in a digital format, so that it can be shared with different healthcare settings.