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Practitioner's Guide to Health Informatics
"This book will be a terrific introduction to the field of clinical IT and clinical informatics" -- Kevin Johnson
"Dr. Braunstein has done a wonderful job of exploring a number of key trends in technology in the context of the transformations that are occurring in our health care system" -- Bob Greenes
"This insightful book is a perfect primer for technologists entering the health tech field." -- Deb Estrin
"This book should be read by everyone. " -- David Kibbe
This book provides care providers and other non-technical readers with a broad, practical overview of the changing US healthcare system and the contemporary health informatics systems and tools that are increasingly critical to its new financial and clinical care paradigms. US healthcare delivery is dramatically transforming and informatics is at the center of the changes. Increasingly care providers must be skilled users of informatics tools to meet federal mandates and succeed under value-based contracts that demand higher quality and increased patient satisfaction but at lower cost. Yet, most have little formal training in these systems and technologies.
Providers face system selection issues with little unbiased and insightful information to guide them. Patient engagement to promote wellness, prevention and improved outcomes is a requirement of Meaningful Use Stage 2 and is increasingly supported by mobile devices, apps, sensors and other technologies. Care providers need to provide guidance and advice to their patients and know how to incorporated as they generate into their care. The one-patient-at-a-time care model is being rapidly supplemented by new team-, population- and public health-based models of care. As digital data becomes ubiquitous, medicine is changing as research based on that data reveals new methods for earlier diagnosis, improved treatment and disease management and prevention.
This book is clearly written, up-to-date and uses real world examples extensively to explain the tools and technologies and illustrate their practical role and potential impact on providers, patients, researchers, and society as a whole.
"
"Dr. Braunstein has done a wonderful job of exploring a number of key trends in technology in the context of the transformations that are occurring in our health care system" -- Bob Greenes
"This insightful book is a perfect primer for technologists entering the health tech field." -- Deb Estrin
"This book should be read by everyone. " -- David Kibbe
This book provides care providers and other non-technical readers with a broad, practical overview of the changing US healthcare system and the contemporary health informatics systems and tools that are increasingly critical to its new financial and clinical care paradigms. US healthcare delivery is dramatically transforming and informatics is at the center of the changes. Increasingly care providers must be skilled users of informatics tools to meet federal mandates and succeed under value-based contracts that demand higher quality and increased patient satisfaction but at lower cost. Yet, most have little formal training in these systems and technologies.
Providers face system selection issues with little unbiased and insightful information to guide them. Patient engagement to promote wellness, prevention and improved outcomes is a requirement of Meaningful Use Stage 2 and is increasingly supported by mobile devices, apps, sensors and other technologies. Care providers need to provide guidance and advice to their patients and know how to incorporated as they generate into their care. The one-patient-at-a-time care model is being rapidly supplemented by new team-, population- and public health-based models of care. As digital data becomes ubiquitous, medicine is changing as research based on that data reveals new methods for earlier diagnosis, improved treatment and disease management and prevention.
This book is clearly written, up-to-date and uses real world examples extensively to explain the tools and technologies and illustrate their practical role and potential impact on providers, patients, researchers, and society as a whole.
"
- GenresHealth Care
183 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2012
2 people are currently reading
18 people want to read
About the author
Mark L. Braunstein
6 books1 followerI'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!
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!
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 3, 2014
This is a decent introduction to ideas around healthcare data interoperability (it's not really about the cloud; were it really about the cloud, it would include topics of burning interest to emergent healthcare companies: For instance, is Amazon's AWS really HIPAA compliant?).
The chapters are authoritative and explain why we need solid and deep analytics (e.g., to understand and treat chronic health issues, which are complex and need lots of data over time; and for the analysis of populations as opposed to individuals).
There are good explanations of SNOMED, the CCD standard, recent directions in EMR/EHRs, software specialized for "patient-centered care," patient portals, etc.
The author assumes that the reader has a high-level understand of HL7 and healthcare EDI (834's, 837's). However, I am sure this is a mistaken assumption. The books on HL7 and EDI stink or are quite old. A book like this would be significantly enhanced with additional chapters on HL7 today and EDI today. Seriously. This is a big gap. There is, for instance, no mention of Mirth Connect, which has emerged as the back office open source swiss army knife for messaging. There is rather a lot of key information that I think is locked up in Braunstein head that is obvious to him, but needs some working out at length by a good author such as himself. The new O'Reilly book Hacking Healthcare is part of the story, but Braunstein brings an academic's serious to the task, and I really think there is a better book that would be about twice as long as this one.
In short: The quality here is high, but it's too brief, and too much like an interim report.
One last thing:
The author acknowledges that a single health data model as in Indiana would be simpler and cheaper, but says: "However, the US is moving strongly away from this model in favor of a federated approach for both economic and political reasons" (p. 81). BOO!! Authors like Braunstein are positioned to argue strenuously against the status quo, and its incredible expense. I think that just rolling over and accepting an inefficient and wasteful system is not what a professor should be doing if he knows better.
The chapters are authoritative and explain why we need solid and deep analytics (e.g., to understand and treat chronic health issues, which are complex and need lots of data over time; and for the analysis of populations as opposed to individuals).
There are good explanations of SNOMED, the CCD standard, recent directions in EMR/EHRs, software specialized for "patient-centered care," patient portals, etc.
The author assumes that the reader has a high-level understand of HL7 and healthcare EDI (834's, 837's). However, I am sure this is a mistaken assumption. The books on HL7 and EDI stink or are quite old. A book like this would be significantly enhanced with additional chapters on HL7 today and EDI today. Seriously. This is a big gap. There is, for instance, no mention of Mirth Connect, which has emerged as the back office open source swiss army knife for messaging. There is rather a lot of key information that I think is locked up in Braunstein head that is obvious to him, but needs some working out at length by a good author such as himself. The new O'Reilly book Hacking Healthcare is part of the story, but Braunstein brings an academic's serious to the task, and I really think there is a better book that would be about twice as long as this one.
In short: The quality here is high, but it's too brief, and too much like an interim report.
One last thing:
The author acknowledges that a single health data model as in Indiana would be simpler and cheaper, but says: "However, the US is moving strongly away from this model in favor of a federated approach for both economic and political reasons" (p. 81). BOO!! Authors like Braunstein are positioned to argue strenuously against the status quo, and its incredible expense. I think that just rolling over and accepting an inefficient and wasteful system is not what a professor should be doing if he knows better.
Displaying 1 of 1 review