1

Health Information Issue Summary # 1

Yesenia Becerra

CSU Channel Islands

Health 302
 2

The issue being presented in the article is the problem in the US healthcare system

regarding data quality. If this issue is resolved in the future, it will change the American

Healthcare system and world into providing better quality care and saving costs. Unfortunately

when a patient goes into a hospital or healthcare office today, health professionals do not have in

their hands all of the data that has already been captured by other healthcare offices regarding a

patient’s health history, risk factors, and any prior treatments. This leads to repeated exams and

poor quality of care. Not only will better quality lead to better services but be efficient to

everyone involved. From the patient to the providers and healthcare system. Providers and

healthcare organizations will be better equipped to deal with additional problems including poor

quality, increasing prices, care gaps, and lack of access if they can develop efficient strategies to

use the data that is already accessible.

According to the article, about 1.2 billion clinical documents are created in the US. This

number continues to rise 48% each year. ( Apixio, 2022) Most of the data is not even used, it sits

around continuing to build up. This data is usually locked away into systems that we usually see

such as EHR and EMR. Many offices do not have these medical systems and much of a patient's

medical history is locked away holding valuable information. In the article it is mentioned that

data quality is a three part data problem. There is access, processing, and insights. (Apixio, 2022)

The first part is access. These systems also need to be worked on in regards to data because it

isn’t easily shareable between healthcare providers. The second part is processing. Individuals

aren't getting the care they need as a result of these data problems, which is the largest impact.

Patients don't receive appropriate treatment plans to address their medical problems when

physicians lack necessary data. This is a serious problem that threatens human life and can only
 3

be resolved by changing how healthcare data is utilized. The third is insight because providers do

not see far beyond what is happening with patients without past history and this leads to a

revaluation with providers leading to repeated exams.

There are currently no other health agencies discussed within the article involved to

change this issue together. AI, artificial intelligence is mentioned as the best option in involving

to analyze the data in a sufficient way that will help healthcare data quality. AI will improve this

issue by being able to identify patterns within the millions of data available that are hard for a

human to detect in a short amount of time. AI will help detect and track records within

healthcare systems. Leading to better quality in both national and global levels.

As mentioned in the article, it is highly important to implement healthcare data quality

changes. In order to achieve this, I think we should strongly focus on doing data management

audits, updating and maintaining data systems, and distributing health data networks in working

together to improve data collection across institutions, and having data set metrics by having the

data set up correctly. (WHO,2012) I enjoyed reading about the use of AI in healthcare data

management and quality, but I feel we still need a lot to figure out before putting millions of

medical records in something we are not familiar with and its capabilities. AI is a good

recommendation but I feel this is for the future as it is able to analyze enormous amounts of data

resulting in something better.

 4

References

Exploring Healthcare's great data problem - apixio blog. APIXIO. (2022, May 17).
Retrieved September 23, 2022, from
https://www.apixio.com/industry-blog/healthcares-great-data-problem/

Management of Patient Information - World Health Organization. Management of patient

information. (2012). Retrieved September 24, 2022, from
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/76794/9789241504645_eng.pdf?sequence
=1