At Phoenix Children’s Hospital, information technology links all clinical specialties, connects patients to their doctors, moves images from one location to another and is instrumental in disease control and healthcare planning. It is viewed as an enabler of quality care.
IT plays a role when a patient is making an appointment, having an X-ray or interacting with the physician through telehealth. It’s integral to specialists who are looking at infection control across the whole hospital, or when an image is being transmitted across the city or the nation. The common denominator in all these is IT, says Dr. Vinay Vaidya, M.D., Vice President and Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Phoenix Children’s, and good-quality, standardized information that flows efficiently around the hospital is critical to the future of care.
“In a hospital like ours, there are many specialists: there is a pulmonary doctor for the lungs, there’s a cardiologist for the heart, an infectious disease specialist. We view clinical IT to be an extension of that service. It’s one more service that helps physicians take care of their patients through information technology,” Dr. Vaidya says.
