Exploring How Informatics is Changing Health Education during National Health Education Week

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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

• Lately, a global public health crisis has covered the news. Ebola is making its deadly way across communities in West Africa, and a few isolated cases have been diagnosed outside this region, including two nurses who contracted the Ebola virus in Dallas.
  
  Controlling infectious diseases like Ebola is precisely the reason why the field of public health first became so important over a century ago. By teaching populations about evidence-based methods for containing disease, and by putting in place effective systems to prevent their rise, lives have been saved and public health has been improved.

Social Media and Your Health Information

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Wednesday, October 15, 2014
written by Susan Fenton, PhD, RHIA, FAHIMA

• Anything on the internet can survive forever.
  
  While this sentence can be scary, it is, unfortunately, often too true. We – you, I, our friends and family – often use social media for communication and information gathering. There are sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, where people share much more than health care information, as well as health care and disease-specific sites such as Patients Like Me.

The AHIMA Convention and Information Governance

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Monday, September 29, 2014
written by Susan Fenton, PhD, RHIA, FAHIMA

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  This week the UT School of Biomedical Informatics is participating in the 2014 American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Convention and Exhibit in San Diego, CA. This 86th annual convention draws health information management (HIM) professionals, thought leaders and executives from all areas of health care and information management. Speaker highlights include Dr. Karen DeSalvo (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) and Dr. Eric Topol, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine. Both of these are “not to be missed.” However, many other topics will be discussed. One I’d like to focus on for this blog is information governance.

The Four Elements that Make UTHealth SBMI Stand Out and Stand Above

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Wednesday, September 24, 2014
written by Susan Fenton, PhD, RHIA, FAHIMA

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  Houston is a city full of treasures. We are the most diverse city in the nation, home to some of the best and brightest minds in a variety of fields. Houston is Space City USA and is home to a phenomenal Museum District and a thriving cultural scene. The UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics is one of Houston’s treasures, and it has the immense potential to shape the future of health care within the city, state, nation and the whole world. While health informatics programs continue to be established around the country as the field enjoys near exponential growth, there are four reasons why SBMI stands above the competition.

The Importance of HIT in Healthcare

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Wednesday, September 17, 2014
written by Susan Fenton, PhD, RHIA, FAHIMA

• Why is health information technology (HIT) important to health care?  This a question I first heard when I was working on my doctoral degree.  I had returned to school to earn a PhD because I had come to the realization that the industry needed more research to effectively utilize health information technology (HIT) in the delivery of healthcare.  In fact, after much consideration and thought, I had come to the conclusion that the effective use of HIT was essential to meet the goals of the U.S. health care industry.