Health Care Database Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Health Care Database Systems - Essay Example Database Management Systems (DBMS) have been introduced to develop and alter these data. Databases are widely employed across the healthcare industry for satisfying a range of needs. As Martin (2008) points out, healthcare databases really assist the industry by performing a range of healthcare functions, including the areas of patient care, hospital administration, and research and education. The author adds that the field of critical care medicine has significantly advanced with the development of well-integrated healthcare databases. Viljoen (2009) argues that these databases are greatly beneficial for physicians to obtain easy access to the previous health history of individual patients and hence to begin treatment as early as possible (p.v). In other words, healthcare databases eliminate the need for a prolonged communication between doctors and patients or any other unwanted delay in treatment. In the current healthcare environment, databases are widely used to facilitate local assessments or evaluations. For instance, health professionals rely on healthcare databa ses for assessing specific outpatient conditions or inpatient hospital events. In addition, these data are increasingly used regionally or nationally for evaluating and comparing the performance of various healthcare systems within or across the industry. As Martin suggests, administrative data provided by healthcare databases can be used for comparing across national boundaries and identifying the differences in healthcare and disease globally. The writer adds that â€Å"administrative healthcare databases are uniquely suitable for epidemiological studies of disease, particularly for studying the incidence or outcome of rare diseases that are impossible to study locally or within traditional cohort studies† (Martin, 2008).  Ã‚