The main role of Health Management Information Systems during emergencies is to determine the need to allocate resources appropriately. It focuses on quantifying the gap experienced in the healthcare sector in sustains where the trouble is inevitable. To avoid the avoid, the health management information system provides statistics and analyzes them in the prevailing emergencies. The HMIS includes information on the importance of the needs and various coping mechanisms and the capacity of the affected population by the crisis. to come up with coping m, tools; the HMIS employs rapid assessment techniques, nutrition surveys on the people, disease surveillance and supplying drugs and medicines to all humanitarian workers.
Health management information systems can trigger the decisions to provide resource allocation guidelines and help develop planning programs. Such programs are provided with disease surveillance data by healthcare facilities in areas where diseases are reported daily.in such cases, the HMIS provides laboratory services that help them to report confirmed cases, for example, in cases of cholera or typhoid outbreak. Surveys are used to approximate mortality rate and nutritional status to obtain the population data .this methods used by HMIS serve the same purpose, with an objective of the burdens of generating samples without considering the statistics. The sampling method is commonly used during emergencies because it is simple to apply and implement.
Health management information systems collaborate with agencies to generate resources and determine operations’ capacity in the affected areas. This helps to assess the extent of a good return on investment that remains to be tested. In such actions, it may be easier for donors to be attracted by the joint efforts to cater to the prevailing emergency. This will ensure that a pool of resources will be created to cater to emergencies .apart from that, a well-funded HIS provides conditions that enhance the credibility of statistics.
These systems also help health care providers to get macro environments information easily; an example is the health trends of the population. They also give information to health care organizations used for treatment which is known for the best outcomes. Doctors also use the information to make decisions regarding the facets of patient care. This helps where a patient’s medical history is needed, and with the help of the health management information systems, it can be easily accessed. The information helps in developing a comprehensive care unit for many patients during emergencies.
References
Chen, S., Zhang, Z., Yang, J., Wang, J., Zhai, X., Bärnighausen, T., & Wang, C. (2020). Fangcang shelter hospitals: a novel concept for responding to public health emergencies. The Lancet, 395(10232), 1305-1314.
Kaplan, B. (2020). Revisiting health information technology ethical, legal, and social issues and evaluation: telehealth/telemedicine and COVID-19. International journal of medical informatics, 143, 104239.
Ye, J. (2020). The role of health technology and informatics in a global public health emergency: practices and implications from the COVID-19 pandemic. JMIR medical informatics, 8(7), e19866.
