Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay

The convergence of technology in the 21st century has enabled many healthcare organizations to adopt technology products that avail informational resources, patient-related information, employee information and terms, decision support tools and other features that are important to the delivery of safe and efficient healthcare (Rada, 2008).Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay

This paper reports the findings of an interview conducted with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Pine Breeze health facility regarding the databases available to both clinical and administrative personnel. In the interview, the CIO acknowledged that the healthcare organization had adopted four tiers of clinical databases, namely: clinical decision support systems, electronic medical registers, general healthcare information meant for patients, and telemedicine.

These tiers, according to the CIO, are implemented on secure internet-based protocols, with two of the tiers – decision support systems and electronic medical registers – integrated into a multi-institutional framework serving 50 health facilities in the region.Clinical and Personnel Databases Essay

The interviewee particularly stressed the importance of clinical databases and electronic patient information databases in ensuring efficient, consistent and error-free delivery of health services. According to Health Hero Network (2009), “…clinical databases consist of observational data collected on patients who meet specific criteria” (para. 1).

The respondent further clarified that clinical databases are institutional-specific, multi-institutional, and population-based. Institutional-based clinical databases dealt with information about patients visiting this particular health facility while multi-institutional databases profiled patient accruals in multiple health facilities.

Health Hero Network (2009) posits that multi-institutional databases are often used to address challenges related to inter-facility discrepancies and to develop statistical paradigms to forecast patient results based on prognostic factors. Population-based clinical databases are often required in the healthcare context to evaluate disease incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates not only in the health facility but also across the region.