This is the second article in our series highlighting technology innovations that are transforming healthcare. Read the first article on electronic health records (EHRs) and picture archive and communication systems (PACS).

Electronic health records (EHRs) enable medical staff and healthcare professionals to reduce the number of medical errors and increase patient safety. And the rapid adoption of EHR systems, with the goal of achieving Meaningful Use, means that patient data, which is now stored electronically in databases across the healthcare ecosystem, is available for research and discovery. For example, this data can be mined to study treatment protocols and their resulting patient outcomes to enable public health safety agencies to identify health risks and pharmaceutical companies to enhance their drug research.

This is made possible with healthcare informatics – applications that combine software, hardware, and services to access data (with all personally identifiable information filtered out) from disparate databases and analyze it to provide decision support for evidence-based medicine and to improve hospital operational efficiencies. The power of interlinked data stores in the medical industry provides the ability to make better decisions based on more information about the patient at the point of care.

Because healthcare informatics takes mountains of data and breaks it down into pebbles of useful information, it requires a high-speed network interconnecting the healthcare ecosystem. Ethernet is one option that provides the speed, flexibility, security, and cost-effective scalability that can make informatics a reality for any healthcare organization.

Tomorrow: consumer wearables