There is a huge plethora of diseases in the world that requires a big database for scientific and epidemic study purposes. The need for easy compilation of health records gave birth to the disease index. This post promises to shed more light on the disease index, the purposes, and the benefits of having a quality disease index.
What is a disease index?
Disease indexes are necessary for searching for medical records and offering cross-reference for all patients for an array of purposes. These disease indexes are essential for biomedical and scientific research, medical services, and health statistics. These are used bases on health complications, ages, genders, and ailments.
Depending on the regulations of the state where this disease index is used, the maintenance may be mandatory or optional for all health organizations. However, the final decision to maintain the disease index is entirely up to medical officials. A detailed disease index should contain patients’ health records, attending doctors, date of admission, length of stay, and discharge time.
Furthermore, this disease index could be manual or automated. With the advancement in technology, many health firms have installed software for the automated version. Though, the automated system is faster because all a physician needs is the code to access residents, it is not cheap.
While the manual disease index seems to be fading with time, it is affordable and more detailed.
Purpose of a Disease index
There are many purposes for the creation of a disease index, they include:
Storage purpose
A disease index has two main storage purposes, source-related purposes and problem-oriented purposes. These two are important because they contain the detailed information on why the patient was admitted and how the problem was solved. This can come in handy for physicians who come across similar ailments in other patients.
Offer easy health access to patients
A key purpose of the disease index is to provide residents quick access to medical records using an ICD-9- CD code.
Quicken health records search
The birth of the disease index makes searching medical records faster. The quicker these records are available, the provision of better and quality services.
For medical research purposes
The disease index is used by scientists to ascertain how health practices are done and for research purposes. Instead of calling residents/patients individually, scientists can just go directly to the disease index to get information.
Benefits of a disease index
Some advantages of having a detailed disease index are:
The prescription of excellent medications
A good disease index will aid medical organizations to give appropriate drugs to patients with similar ailments after good analysis. Since some diseases are related, having a record of a resident having related illness will make the doctor and physician job easier.
Better productivity for health workers
Using a disease index improves a better working atmosphere between health staff and his can make productivity easier and better. This becomes possible because all dates can be retrieved easily without stressing medical staff.
Saves time and cost
A crucial benefit of a disease index is that health records are easily located quickly which makes better health decisions. Also, health organizations are saved some money they would have incurred without using the disease index.
Disease index remains an excellent choice for documentation of medical records of patients which many health operators used for specific purposes.