Health information services and the changing paradigm of information science

Abstract

In the present work, developed within the disciplinary field of information science, we introduce what some contemporaneous authors define as the new paradigm called post-custodial, informational and scientific paradigm, which conveys a holistic view of information and has a direct effect on the organization of services. Then, we present a brief overview of studies on health information services and we show the major conclusions of a study of the information services in the hospitals of the Portuguese National Health Service, conducted in the past five years in order to know their organization and operation. Taking the mentioned paradigm as the theoreticalepistemological reference of our work, and based on the findings obtained in this study, we propose a model for the (re)organization of information services in the hospital context, considering the integrated, systemic and dynamic vision of the information.