IT in Health Care Management Information Systems

Question: Describe about the IT in Health Care for Management Information Systems. Answer: Introduction The technology has greatly influenced and altered on the structure and the operations in all the industries. To any management of an existing business the major question is not whether the Information technology will be relevant to the business needs, but rather what they will do to the profit from the change. The technology is evolving in many part of the business and it enables to create new business opportunities. In the last decade information technology has experienced various unprecedented changes, not only is this technology changing the way we conduct the business, but also changing on the way people live. (Clemons Weber, 1990)The society in general has become business centered. Today many business professionals are becoming more aware of the values of managing the relationship and communicating aspect in the business effectively, both with the employees and the client. The Information technology has become a significant component to the business. IT is a system that is most ly used for the control, to manage the processes and to create information through technology. According to John Browning he stipulated that the IT use today is no longer a business resource, but rather it is business environment. (Clemons Weber, 1990)The business organization needs to process that information in that environment and making of the decision aspect would be sustainably increased. In this paper, the analysis is on IT in healthcare. It will analyze on a business organization of Maroba Lodge that benefited from implementing of technology based system in which they had the challenge in their resident management system software that could not support the changes to the funding application and the tracking aspect introduced by the government. The report will try to answer questions as to why the business needs the information technology, more so to this organization how they have benefited. Does business need IT? The businesses definitely needs the Information technology in the day to day running of the organization. It is important to the Maroba Lodge in that it eases the work for their patients. With the implementation of the iCareHealth management solution, they are able to keep record of their resident medical information including the temperature, urinalysis, the blood pressure and any incidence of the accident. Through this way it gives the doctor to provide a quick diagnosis if the client comes to seek the medical attention. (Henderson Venkatraman, 1993)Moreover, the software has been found to provide a comprehensive medication management from the aspect of ordering the drugs from the pharmacy, to displaying which medications are required in a particular incident. If there is no use of information Technology it would have taken more time to do this and more time would be lost if the client was in critical condition. Business needs IT solutions to simplify their work and undertake many task at the same time as comparison to the manual reporting and gathering of information. In the case of Maroba they can easy create individual care plans, providing complete to-date records of the residents and their medication, through linking doctors information from application Medical Director (Henderson Venkatraman, 1993). This clearly shows Information Technology in action, gathering, and arranging information for quick decision making, hence IT is very vital to any business. Why IT is significant for business survival? The success of every business depend on various factors. Some are accurate analysis, choice of the correct technology and vision. In the research done, shows that organization which invest in Information Technology and choose it as the path for their innovation, usually have an increased market share, competitive advantage and high financial figures. (Longstaff, Chittister, Pethia Haimes, 2000)The Information Technology is the only component that can provide an opportunity to analyzing on the specific data and plan on the business needs accordingly. It provides with the tools to solve some of the complex problem and plan for the future growth. The Information Technology provides with the digital marketing platform which is a great tool to market the products and the services. In addition, it helps to speech up the decision making process in the organization. In every successful business it ought to undergo through a comprehensive market research process to enable the management to t ake the right decision. This market research be done through, the Big data and the Google analytic tools to gather useful information that are helpful to decision making. To add to this, it is important for the management of the resources and the globalization. (Longstaff, Chittister, Pethia Haimes, 2000)The management resources is significant to the health organization business. In the Maroba organization it is a medium organization in which the top management cannot manage all the resources manually. The resources can be tangible, financial, and the human resources. The use of the Information Technology plays a vital role in automating all these complex problems by introducing a solution. There is use of the Enterprise Resource Planning solution, to help to put all these component into one and easily manageable. The management can monitor on their resources virtually at any part of the world using just their computers, or smartphones (Longstaff, Chittister, Pethia Haimes, 2000). What is required to apply IT in business? When applying the IT in the business, there are some component that needs to be considered. One such component is the cost, the organization needs to know the initial cost for the system, in the case of Maroba they needed to consider various alternative, to find the cheapest but efficient. There also the ongoing cost, that are acquired in the maintaining of the system, the licensing, and the hosting of the software. There are also the upgrade cost, and the expected lifespan for the system. The organization also need to plan for the technology, so that they do not spend most their budget on infrasture, the hosted application. It is also important the planning for this depend on the industry and the business. The business should have budget for the equipment, the installation and the training of the personnel to know the system. It is important to decide who will help in the implementation of the technology. There is need for the open source consultant, to know the specific needs of th e organization needs. How does business use IT? The information Technology can be useful in the business in various ways. At the Maroba Lodge, the staff can confidently use the iCareHealth software to document and also to manage every aspect of the care. They can access every resident care, their medication and financial information. They are therefore able to update the records whenever they are using their Table, or a laptop. This enables them to work more efficiently as a team due to many benefits to the system. To the customers they can easily get their medication and the drug easily since the doctor information on the patient is linked to the iCareHealth, thus enabling easy creation of individual plan, and up to date update. Moreover, the system can easily complete the funding application which are not compliant with the government requirement. Thus, they can quickly pull any reports that they want for the benchmarking or for the purpose of quality control. What benefits and advantage does IT bring to the business? Benefits Information technology has many benefits it strives in an organization. One of them is speed and time. The information transfer within an organization can be enhanced through the use of the technology. The Maroba Lodge, the staff can easily update the records of the residents and they can also fill the compliant report on time, since the system has got many additional functionalities. Another benefit, it provide easier storage capabilities. The use of the IT can easily eliminate the errors for the double entry in the systems and reduces on the need to filing a lot of paper work. The information of the customers in the health care can be stored in form of virtual data where is can be accessed very quickly if need be. In addition, it improves sharing of information. The use of the technology, allows the information to be quickly shared with fewer resources. This helps to reduce the cost of hiring new staff to manually input the information or update the files. Advantages On the advantages of the IT in the business, it helps to the automation processes. In business individual seek ways to do more work in a shorter time, the use of the IT improves the organization efficiency by the use of the automated process to take the burden from the staff. Another, advantage IT gives the business the remote access to the organization electronic network. This accessibility helps to increase the productivity, since you can do the work without being at the work place. In addition, IT gives the business the resources it require to communicate efficiently. What type of risk does IT bring to business? In the implementation of the IT in the business, it can result to some serious risk. Some of the risk is the confidentiality risk. In the implementation of the software by Maroba organization, they store all the data, of the patients from medical, medication, and their health history. If there is breach of the system by a third party or hackers, and get it such information is no longer confidential which may result to legal issues with the patients. There is also the risk of the security and privacy. If the system are not well implemented they may be prone to breach by hackers, or the uninformed staff who steal such information. In the wrong hands, it can cause damage to the reputation of the organization. (Powell Dent-Micallef, 1997). In addition, there are information risks that relate to the inherent features and the value of the information. Such risks may occur as result of the carelessness of the employees, who are not trained on the security practices, and leak the informatio n, through access of business data through unencrypted network, thus exposing it to malicious attach. How can business maintain and monitor IT? The business can maintain and monitor IT in the following ways. One of the action to cater for this is to have a security program in place. This is important since it manages the risk by identifying on the assets, discovering on the threats and estimating on those risk, it will also help to provide the employees with the security education to know the vulnerabilities that may affect the system. Another way to maintain and monitor is to have security control. These controls could be for the administrative, technical or the physical control aspects. There can also be implementation of the security patch policy on the network in order to keep always the system up to date. (Powell Dent-Micallef, 1997)Nonetheless, there could be backup of information Technology monitoring. This will help to protect the data from lose. The backup monitoring will back up the systems on a daily basis all the information that is entered to the system. Conclusion In this paper, it has analyzed on the Maroba Lodge business organization in the health care sector. It has looked on why the business needs IT, giving both benefits and advantages in the business. In addition, it has looked on reasons why IT is important for the survival of the business. In addition, there was a need to look at how the business uses IT, and also the risk it brings to the business. Nonetheless, there were ways highlighted in which the business uses to maintain and monitor the implementation of the Information Technology. References Clemons, E. K., Weber, B. W. (1990). Strategic information technology investments: guidelines for decision making. Journal of Management Information Systems, 7(2), 9-28. Henderson, J. C., Venkatraman, N. (1993). Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM systems journal, 32(1), 4-16. Longstaff, T. A., Chittister, C., Pethia, R., Haimes, Y. Y. (2000 ). 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