Health and Medicines

Healthcare in the United States
At least one/3 of Americans is currently uninsured. This figure is tormented by the shortage of access to quality healthcare. It’s verified that? of healthcare insurance is provided through employment. With these days’s society, some jobs don’t even supply healthcare thanks to higher insurance costs. With the rise in job loss, healthcare access is currently a hassle and lots of Americans don’t seem to be capable to seek reasonable medical care. So long as healthcare could be a privilege during this country and not a right, the well-being of Americans can be subject to a lot of health disparities than before. The U.S Department of Health has established Healthy Individuals 2010 to enhance the key health indicators of the country; the initiative is devoted to perk up the principle that no matter age, gender, race or ethnicity, income or social status every one should have access to equal and all-inclusive care across the nation.

Sadly, in keeping with the Wall Street journal, more than 46 million of Americans lack adequate health insurance and also the numbers are larger than ever. If the primary indicator of the Healthy Individuals 2010 is to improve access to healthcare, why is it that the majority Americans still cannot access care? Insurance costs are gradually increasing; Medicaid and Medicare system is turning into additional of a funny story than insurance. Older people are finding themselves while not insurance; very little is being done to facilitate access to health insurance for the elderly. Older individuals are left behind and made to induce supplemental insurance and typically a secondary insurance to hide for health care services. The elderly are turned down for health insurance by the govt. and it is unacceptable that a sixty five year previous man or feminine during this country struggles to own health coverage.

Older individuals’s applications for health insurance are forged off; it should be universal for the elderly to receive healthcare insurance without being subjected to hassle. What’s happening to the United States Healthcare system? Where is the correct for care for our elderly primarily and our youngsters secondary? Medicaid fees are taken from our salary but after we retire, there can be no Medicaid for our generation. What can the govt do to alter this rising state of affairs? It is a prodigy to determine healthcare primarily based community health systems take over, to assist those in want of healthcare. These community health systems, are keen, to place folks on a sliding fee scale they’ll afford to receive health services.

I personally applaud Saint Joseph Mercy Care Services for providing care to the homeless and therefore the poor and to offer the Atlanta community access to worry on a sliding fee scale, so all will receive care. Our Government should explore our health system closely and realize ways in which to supply look after all by creating or encouraging more community based services all around the nation.

The govt. ought to minimize the price of care and set a fix rate with insurance companies; the fix rate should enable for every individual to have access to affordable insurance. So, everybody ought to have access to healthcare while not long waiting period. Pre-existing condition ought to be banished and also the individual’s care should be everybody’s business during this country.

If our goal is to get rid of health disparities, we have a tendency to should let people acquire care for conditions they currently have without a 1 year waiting amount prior to treatment. It is vital to involve the population into health choices thus that better resolution will be taken. I believe that everyone has the right for care; I feel that by providing healthcare services to the uninsured, we tend to as a nation can be on the move to eliminating health disparities. Our mission should be to provide quality healthcare to those without access to insurance during a appropriate way. Our aim ought to be to assuage health disparities by providing care to the impoverished and to all.

A robust nation just like the United States of America should make healthcare precedence. We have a tendency to have great technology, nice doctors but a poor healthcare system. In Europe, healthcare could be a right to European’s citizens. the government covers for healthcare services; there are not any age requirements, no limitations, no waiting period and no pre-existing condition clause. The insurance premium is taken from every individual’s paycheck on a yearly basis. This lump add is then applied towards the price of medical services. Healthcare isn’t a privilege it is a right. That you are utilized or unemployed, you must have the correct to insurance coverage.

Healthcare ought to not be a political subject however a constitutional right to any or all Americans. It’s time for the govt. to seem into reforming our healthcare system and to produce insurance to all. Private Insurances should be set for non-citizen and people visiting. Our pursuit as Americans should be higher health for all and insurance for all. With the economy going downhill, it’s imperative that the population decides on what is best for Americans however not for the government. If the proposed healthcare plan that President Obama have out is disseminated as it should, we have a tendency to may be on our way to universal healthcare which several don’t want.
Needless to say that Healthcare reform is critical for the healthiness of Americans. The stress gained from the loss of jobs and lack of adequate finances will bring a lot of illnesses than never before. The actual fact is, people are worrying about what they can eat or drink; therefore, they spend restless nights wondering regarding the following step and how they will cowl their kids’s college fees or perhaps pay their mortgage. Of these thoughts have a great impact on the overall health of many. Consequently, if no insurance is provided to people who are unemployed, then we tend to can expect to carry the burden of desperate deaths ensuing from this highly crucial state of affairs our nation is facing.

I am very satisfied with the passing of the healthcare reform bill; the expectations are high and we have a tendency to hope the govt. will not fail us. Within the midst of what had been said regarding the new bill raising insurance premiums and taxes, you and I should wonder how that can have an effect on every one folks individually. Either means, let’s simply cross our fingers and hope for the best shall we?

The seamless integration of knowledge and data is indispensible to today’s modern healthcare decision support systems. A healthcare organization that thoroughly understands its patients and is able to respond quickly to their needs, scores highly with them—and this has become an extremely important competitive component in today’s ever-more interconnected world where patient feedback can positively or negatively affect an organization’s reputation and bottom line.

The patient care world is complex, with various information systems being utilized to streamline and automate patient care processes. Fortunately, there is a new approach to IT efficiency vis-à-vis ontological engineering—or ontology programming—that is possibly the most significant benefit to ensuring accurate data integration, which fosters a better understanding of patient needs, thus resulting in better patient care and excellent patient outcomes.

Ontological engineering excel at extracting knowledge and critical information from the various information systems within a healthcare decision support system (or its organizational databases). Ontology programming reduces often difficult data integration issues and promotes data reuse, data sharing, and common vocabularies between the information systems, from patient intake to patient discharge.

For healthcare organizations to understand their patients better, data across the entire organization or spectrum of information systems involved in patient care must to be analyzed. Knowledge from different areas or “domains” (e.g., the patient-entry process domain, hospitalization and treatment domains, and billing and insurance domains) must to be extracted in order to accurately interpret quality of care.

Detailed knowledge is also required to interpret patient responses to the various care options exercised from the time of entry into the healthcare facility through final discharge. In addition, quality healthcare organizations strive to improve their existing processes and analyze post-care data in order to determine areas of improvement and initiate appropriate programs. Therefore, the accurate compilation and correlation of patient data is essential during the care process—both individually and in aggregate with other patient data—to determine potential process improvement steps.

As mentioned previously, healthcare organizations also benefit from their patients’ recovering better and more quickly as a result of higher quality care. This is, in no small part, driven by efficient information systems. Patient care results are reflected in quality reports issued by premier organizations such as JCAHO (Joint Commission for Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations). As of 2009, JCAHO reports include patient satisfaction data, as well, thus making it even more important to understand patient information effectively and utilize to it to render care that leads to better patient satisfaction.

Accurate knowledge across intra-organizational domains can only be extracted when healthcare decision support systems are able to exchange relevant data with each other—which is not always possible with current configurations. Even if the numerous systems within an organization can connect to each other through common computer interfaces, they may have stored patient data differently, rendering information exchange virtually impossible and creating a silo effect. Additionally, the context in which the information is used may vary from system to system, making it even more difficult to correlate data across various platforms and systems within the organization. Finally, data consistency and data integrity issues arise as each silo information system is further customized to optimize the information system’s performance.

Therefore, to achieve a comprehensive and accurate individual patient view across the entire patient care spectrum of an organization, different information systems-based reports may have to be compiled separately with data correlated between them. The results will then need to be represented in a single, coherent report. This type of data correlation may include the mapping of various customer names for a single patient, as an example. Obviously, this type of system is not only vulnerable to error and to data integrity and consistency issues, but it is also quite inefficient and, therefore, needlessly costly.

Data correlation, integrity, and integration issues are not confined within an organization’s systems only. Health care organizations rely on HIE (Healthcare Information Exchange) to communicate with external entities. HIE is used to move clinical information between different information systems from various providers (i.e. test labs, insurance companies, and other healthcare facilities) without losing the meaning of the information exchanged. These systems typically use established standards for data exchange, such as SNOMED CT, ICD-9 and ICD-10, and other HIE standards.

Periodic updates are required, and organizations must ensure that they are in compliance in order to participate in data exchanges with other providers. Naturally, whenever any data changes occur, the cost and time required to modify multiple systems within an organization can be staggering, but without the use of ontological engineering, the higher costs must be borne, as system modifications are mandatory.

Whether the data reside internally or external sources are employed for HIE, a healthcare organization faces the common issues of data mapping, data integration, reuse, and data sharing.  Whenever data change, or new relationships between data are discovered, organizations expend valuable resources in time and money adjusting databases across various systems in an attempt to keep them aligned with each other. This absorbs important resources, taking them away from the core focus and value proposition of the organization—that of providing quality patient care.

When data change, especially internal organizational data, conventional technologies (as in “relational” databases) require changes to their database structures and schemas, potentially leading to major regression testing of the systems after the changes have been completed.  This must be accomplished in order to ensure that nothing is deleted or corrupted after the changes are made, and is quite naturally, another costly step—both in terms of time and resources.

Information technology departments have tried to respond to data integrity and data integration issues across various systems within an organization by building a data warehouse that acts as a central repository for most, or all, of the inter-related systems. However, the solution is only partially successful. Often times, competing interests from various internal “stakeholders” in different information systems can lead to data that is stored in a manner is favorable to some information systems, but not others. This, of course, potentially compromises data access and reuse by other systems.

In addition, since the entire organization’s data cannot be migrated to a data warehouse simultaneously, some systems are migrated before others, and the entire migration process may take as long as a year or more to complete in a large health care organization. In the interim, data across the enterprise changes, and the whole cycle of re-aligning data must start anew. There have been proposed solutions to address this and other related problems, but they each leave something to be desired.

Ontology programming can help reduce data integration, sharing, and reuse pains to quite an extent. By definition, they are “a formal representation of knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain.” They not only store data in a database, but also store relationships, including hierarchical relationships, between data.

This ability distinguishes ontological software from standard relational databases and provides the flexibility of updating data and relationships between them. Ontologies are also able to add newly discovered relationships without the necessity of significantly changing the core database or requiring extensive programming efforts—unlike typical databases currently in use.  They also excel at removing term confusion and providing data mapping capabilities, which vastly promotes improved data share and data reuse across an organization’s information systems.

For healthcare organizations, as well as other large business enterprises, the practical, time-saving applications of a system built on ontology programming are quite extensive. We know that ontological engineering provides the ability to extract knowledge contained within applications and information systems across the various domains within an organization, but it is also very useful for capturing “real world decisions” made by humans and converting it into computer format. The result of this capturing of knowledge across domains by SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and healthcare providers leads to much more consistent query results whenever similar conditions are encountered in the future.

Such information system architecture can significantly reduce medical errors and enhance patient care. This can be accomplished, for instance, by the capturing of a healthcare professional’s diagnosis of a particular medical condition and other relevant data. Once the data are entered into the ontological system, it will consistently provide the same results for similar conditions in the future and offer the diagnostics and conclusions as an aid to other healthcare professionals.

Subsequently, a healthcare professional may choose to exercise the same diagnostics (or treat the patient differently according to differences in patient circumstances), but the healthcare decision supportsystem’s information can now provide an important, relevant checkpoint based upon the previous diagnostic information.

In conclusion, the use of ontology programming in the healthcare field provides a significant reduction in data integration issues and—because semantic technologies are superior extractors of knowledge across multiple information systems and can add new relationships between such systems with relative ease—they provide the flexibility to change data with far less effort and cost than standard systems now require.

Consequently, ontological engineering are able to provide an invaluable component to improved patient care and outcomes by supporting critical healthcare processes and decision-making. The superior integration of knowledge and data within healthcare organizations may at first appear prosaic, but it is nothing short of revolutionary in its potential to affect organizational performance and quality care.