Health Information Systems (HIS): Concept And Technology

Medical information systems are now pervasive in most hospitals. However, health information systems (HIS) are essential to support decision making and planning to improve health policies that can promote global health development. For this purpose, HIS need to contain data on determinants of health, infrastructure of services, and cost/effectiveness of health interventions and health care procedures. The difficulty and cost of setting up systems for the collection of these data with the required comprehensiveness and reliability have produced systems that are called “data-led” because of the tendency to use data that are more easily available. However, what is required are “action-led” HIS, mainly in developing countries, to focus decision making and the data collection effort on those actions that can produce maximum gains in health with the resource base available. To achieve this goal, considerable changes in attitudes and concepts are required, as well as further research into the cognition of decision making in health policy and planning. New technologies, such as knowledge-based engineering, can be of particular value to maximize the wealth of knowledge available in any region. Action-led systems are likely to be highly dependent on mathematical and/or statistical modeling techniques to answer “What if?” questions in a given scenario.