Health Informatics

Health Informatics

Health Informatics is the information engineering applied to the field of health care, essentially the management and use of patient health care information.  

Health care informatics deals with the resources, devices and method to utilize acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine and knowledge for problem solving and decision making. Both biomedical and informatics are related fields. 

What does a health informatics do?

Health informatic professionals use their knowledge of healthcare, information systems, data to gather, store, interpret and manage the massive amount of data generated when care is provided. 

Digital health 

 It is also related to healthcare systems which uses the computational technologies, devices, applications, to aid healthcare professionals, and their clients manage illness and as well as promote health and well-being.  

These technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services including telemedicine, web-based analysis, email, mobile phones and applications, text messages, wearable devices, and clinic or remote monitoring sensors. 

Digital response to covid-19 

These are mobile software applications designed to aid contact tracing in response to covid-19 pandemic, i.e., which identifies whether a user may have interacted with covid19 positive person by using Bluetooth and GPS. 

Arogya setu application is developed by the National Informatics Centre that comes under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. 

Prime minister Narendra Modi, on Tuesday, addressing the nation, mentioned about Arogya Setu application and emphasized that all people should download the app to fight against the novel corona virus. By the next day, fifty million people have downloaded Arogya setu app, within 13 days of launch in India. 

Arogya Setu application is one of the digital technologies, which helps track the people around who are covid 19 positive by using GPS and bluetooth features and also it collects the information like age, gender, name, health status, place or country and profession to help in the times of need. Once the user provides all the information it builds the data. The application requests access to location all the time and also 

Bluetooth. By using this app, the user can protect him/herself from getting affected. When the two users come in each other’s bluetooth range the app exchange information. And if one of the people is positive to covid-19, the other person gets safety alerts about possibility of getting affected. 

When the concerns of privacy and security issues have been raised the developers of the app stated that the data is securely transmitted and asserted that no personal information of any user has proven to be in risk.  

Modi referred that the possibility of aroghya setu app being an ‘e-pass’ which could facilitate mobility once lockdown measures are relaxed. 

  

Though there is a rapid digitalisation all over the country, there are still few remote areas which are inaccessible to internet and smartphones. Even with internet access few people are unaware of digital health services.  With Bluetooth and GPS, the device battery drains so this could be the limitation for using this app.  

The use of digital health provides information and data to help in prevention and control of diseases. Like the use of Arogya setu app for novel corona virus and many DH interventions have already been developed for other infectious diseases, such as Ebola, SARS, and the flu and other services in coming future. So, the potential for implementing the digital technologies that can be used at different stages of diseases. one should be aware of these digital health services. 

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-Kondala Saisree

B. Pharmacy (IV year)

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