Wikipedia’s definition of Hospital Information Systems

“A hospital information system (HIS), variously also called clinical information system (CIS) is a comprehensive, integrated information system designed to manage the administrative, financial and clinical aspects of a hospital. This encompasses paper-based information processing as well as data processing machines.”

A beg to differ.

There are essentially two major activity segments in which a typical hospital is divided

-Hospital Administration
-Clinical Care Management

Hospial Administration typically includes administrative, financial, day-to-day activities, patients in-bound and out-bound traffic, scheduling, billing and all the other activities.

Clinical Care Management typically includes everything to do with patient’s clinical activities to Interacting with other entities involved in Patient care. This includes Patient encounters, patients medical history records, patient surgeries, medical prescription, pharmacy Integration, Laboratory Integration, Medical equipment interfacing and much more.

Hence clubbing Clinical care management and hospital administration in my opinion is not a good idea.

Hospital administration activities are more of the surrounding activities which revolves more importantly around the financial aspects of the hospital, whereas Clinical management deals with Patient care and safety.

Majority of the Information technology today hits the first section within the hospitals and provide really intutive and easy to use hospital management/information systems. This solutions will have ability to register patients, schedule patients, print bills, manage hospital finances, manage inventories, manage laundries, resource planning and other business functions.

Clinical Information Systems also called “CIS” is an Information technology solution which will be use to increase efficiency in the neglected area of Clinical Management systems. CIS should provide ways and means to improve Quality of clinical care. There is one more general synonym for CIS widespread in the market and this is known as “EMR”. And I must admit this is much closer to CIS than HIS, although not exactly the same. EMR stands for Electronic Medical Record. This is the patient’s medical record which is stored electonically. The entire patient’s medical history is captured electronically in the medical record. However EMR is one part and rather an important part of Clinical Information System. However CIS is much more than just EMR. CIS is targetted to integrate all the clinical activities inside a healthcare unit so that there is seamless interaction between all the eligible clinical systems to attain total patient safety. So along with EMR, one would also have an integrated laboratory, integration pharmacy, integrated nursing,integrated equipments. CIS systems also provide decision support tools to make clinicians better medical decisions based on gathered historical data. They also have clinical alerts capabilities which will allow required timely updates.

To conclude, Clinical Information Sytems are much more than Hospital Information systems or Electronic Medical Records. Clinical Information Systems are built to enchance the overall Clinical Information Workflow rather than just capturing the Patient’s data electronically or increasing hospital administration efficiences.