Thinking about health informatics in my own hospital setting, the potential is huge. It’s all about moving from reactive guesswork to proactive, data-driven decisions. On a daily basis, we’re drowning in information but starved for real insights. Informatics can change that.
For a clinical use, the biggest benefit I can see is in medication management and reconciliation. Right now, when a patient comes in, especially an elderly one with multiple prescriptions from different specialists, piecing together an accurate and current medication list is a nightmare. It’s done by hand, through often-muddled patient recall, and it’s prone to errors. I can see a system that automatically pulls data from community pharmacy networks and primary care EHRs into our hospital’s system. Before a nurse or doctor even starts the reconciliation process, they’d have a verified, pre-populated list to review with the patient, rather than starting from a blank slate. This would drastically reduce the risk of adverse drug events, missed interactions, or dosing errors from the moment a patient is admitted. It would make us all feel so much more confident that we’re starting off on the right foot.
From a public health perspective, the low-hanging fruit for us is in real-time syndromic surveillance for our local community. Our Emergency Department is the canary in the coal mine. We see trends first—whether it’s a spike in flu-like symptoms, gastrointestinal bugs, or even anxiety attacks. Right now, that data gets coded and buried in reports that might be analysed weeks or months later. A smart informatics system could analyse de-identified chief complaints and diagnoses in real-time as they are entered by clinicians. If the system detected an unusual cluster of, say, vomiting cases in a specific postal code, it could automatically alert public health officials. They could then investigate a potential foodborne illness outbreak immediately, maybe even before people start calling their GPs, allowing for faster containment and public warnings. It would transform our hospital from just treating community illness to actively helping protect the community’s health.