Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's New API is Transforming Healthcare

by Mark L. Braunstein

Introduction.- 1: US Healthcare.- 2: Health Informatics in the Real World Today.- 3: Data Standards.- 4: Interoperability Standards (FHIR).- 6: SMART on FHIR.- 7: mHealth.- 8: Population and Public Health.- 9: Analytics and Visualization.- 10: Looking Ahead.

Genres: Nonfiction

341 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2018

About the author

I've been involved with health informatics since well before it was recognized as a useful field! Yes, that goes back to gigantic computers with virtually no horsepower or memory by today's standards. For example, my early work on an electronic medical record was on a DEC PDP-15 'mini computer' (actually quite large) with 64,000 bytes of main (core) memory and twin 30 MB hard drives!

Nevertheless, those of us in the field actually did useful work back then as I try to explain in my latest book, Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's New API is Transforming Healthcare. It is intended to be a broad introduction to the field for readers from a variety of backgrounds. No technical skills required. It starts with a historical perspective and a brief review of the challenges facing healthcare delivery as we all live longer and develop chronic diseases. It then focuses on the FHIR API-based interoperability standard that is having an enormously positive impact on innovation in the field and, in my view, offers great promise for really helping to overcome the challenges I reviewed earlier. I provide numerous case studies to demonstrate why that is the case.

After over 20 years in the commercial health IT segment I've been teaching at Georgia Tech since 2007 where I'm involved in various research projects and work with and advise numerous community and industry groups.

In my spare time I love to cook and enjoy fine wine!

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey everyone, thanks for the thoughtful discussion really interesting takes on how FHIR is shaping the future of health data! I’ve been working on a project where integrating different systems quickly became a real headache. What helped me a lot was using tools that simplify and speed up the process like the platform at nextlevel company. It’s not some magic fix, but it made my life easier when dealing with messy interoperability issues. Just thought I’d share in case anyone’s running into similar roadblocks. Appreciate all the insights here!

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent survey of health data interoperability opportunities and challenges.

[Spencer Kimber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand overview of the complex Health IT environment. I would recommend this to anyone in the industry. It is an incredible book that covers the history and current state of Health IT with an introduction to FHIR.