Changes in health care are at a breakneck pace. Regardless of the many changes we have collectively experienced, delivering health care has been, is, and will continue to be an enormously information-intensive process. Whether caring for a patient or a population, whether managing a clinic or a continuum, we are in a knowledge exchange business. A major task for our industry, and the task for chief information officers (CIOs), is to find and apply improved strategies and technologies for managing healthcare information. In a fiercely competitive healthcare marketplace, the pressures to suc­ ceed in this undertaking-and the rewards associated with success-are enormous. While the task is still daunting, we can all be encouraged by progress being made in information management. There are documented successes throughout health care, and there is growing recognition by healthcare chief executive officers and boards that information strategies, and their deployment, are essential to organizational efficiency, quite pos­ sibly organizational survival.

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Section 1 The Technology Infrastructure.- 1 Local Area Networks and Wide Area Networks.- 2 Data Warehouses and Clinical Data Repositories.- 3 Internet Technologies.- 4 Information System Integrity and Continuity.- Section 2 Information Management Issues For The Integrated Delivery System.- 5 Managed Care: Business and Clinical Issues.- 6 Integrated Delivery Networks.- 7 Information Strategies for Management Services Organizations.- 8 Health Plan Performance Measurement.- Section 3 Managing The Healthcare Information Enterprise.- 9 Meta-Planning: Solutions, Not Projects.- 10 Managing Vendor Relationships.- 11 Outsourcing.- Section 4 Maximizing the Value from Information Management Investments.- 12 Ensuring Value from Information Technology.- 13 Tactics for Optimizing Information Technology.- 14 The Clinical Workstation: Integrating an Academic Health Center.- 15 Process Redesign.- 16 Data Modeling.- Contributors.