Introduction

In this blog, I will post about the impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on health care delivery in hospitals. Coming from a manufacturing sector, I have zero knowledge about this topic. Therefore, this blog might be suitable for those of you who are not familiar with but really interested in this topic. I will do some research about this and share it over here. So, let’s learn together!

 

Before talking about how it will benefit the delivery of health care in hospitals, we should have a clear idea on what exactly health ICT is. The widely used definition is by Brailer and Thompson (2004) of Department of Health and Human Service. They define Health ICT as “the application of information processing involving both computer hardware and software that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and use of health care information, data, and knowledge for communication and decision making”.

So, have you ever wondered how the patient scheduling in hospitals works? How about the staffing in the emergency medicine department? How do they keep our health records anyway? These are just a few examples on how ICT is being utilized by hospitals. Hospitals, by nature, are complex organizations. They have multiple departments and units that must coordinate together when delivering service to the patients. Consequently, an effective information processing is the main prerequisite for an efficient and accurate service. ICT then is a very important component for hospital administration and management.

So that’s a brief introduction about this blog and ICT in hospitals. The next posts will cover more focus and specific topics. Stay tuned!