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Advanced Health Informatics
“If physiology literally means ‘the logic of life’, and pathology is ‘the logic of disease’, then health informatics is the logic of healthcare. . . . With such a pivotal role, it is likely that in the next century, the study of informatics will become as fundamental to the practice of medicine as anatomy has been to the last.” Enrico Coiera
Health informatics, or medical informatics, has been defined as the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine through better data management, analysis, and transmission. Accurate and up-to-date information is required to coordinate the many organizations and people involved in many types of medical services including patient care, patient records, blood supplies and biosurveillance.
As experts in the field of knowledge discovery, information analysis, decision support, business intelligence, supply chain management and system-of-systems technologies, KBSI is applying their expertise by providing medical practitioners with the ability to quickly assess the available information and make time-sensitive medical decisions, in addition to more far reaching decisions involving, for example, the implementation of new information technology-based healthcare solutions. KBSI's health informatics research and technologies can help healthcare industry professionals to effectively innovate and improve their medical services and their administration, allowing them to forecast staff, equipment, facility, medication, and consumables demand based on patient profiles, diagnostic trends, changing demographics, and other factors.
KBSI has also applied its work in knowledge discovery, forecasting, and pattern discovery to biosurveillance technology that monitors medical data for signs of a biological outbreak and technology that tracks and analyzes, using predictive logistics and forecasting, the inventory and supply chain status of blood and blood products, providing a graphical dashboard for the management of the blood chain. This technology has been used in managing inventory at the regional level for over 700 hospitals and clinics and to anticipate demand utilizing agent-based alerts and notifications that identify problems under changing conditions and provide quicker response to changing conditions.
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