Despite its high cost, the US healthcare system produces relatively short life spans, and is wasteful, inefficient and has serious safety and quality issues. While other industries have surmounted similar challenges by transforming themselves through information technology, healthcare lags behind. Major reasons are that our approaches to care delivery and financial incentives were designed for a bygone era. Beyond that the technology offered to practitioners has often been overly expensive, poorly designed, overly proprietary, hard to implement and difficult to use. Spurred by a unique, one-time Federal stimulus and the new mobile, wireless and cloud technologies now available, this landscape is rapidly changing. To succeed going forward practitioners, and those interested in entering the field, need to understand the new driving forces and have a basic understanding of contemporary clinical informatics. Practitioners, in particular, need to understand the alternative technologies and approaches available for their use in individual patient care and more continuous management of their chronic disease patients. To efficiently meet these needs, this book provides an introduction to the rationale for care transformation through clinical informatics; its application to patient care outside of hospitals; and a look at its future. Key points are illustrated throughout by actual examples of open source and commercial health IT products and services. While written with practitioners and students entering the field of clinical informatics in mind, the book eschews technical terminology and is easily accessible by the lay reader not proficient in clinical medicine or information technology.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Mark Braunstein, MD, an author and thought leader in the field, taught health informatics in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology for over a decade. After a successful career as a health IT entrepreneur, he joined Georgia Tech in 2007 as a Professor of the Practice. He developed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the field and his unique health informatics graduate seminar was the first to be centered on HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard. In it, student teams work with domain experts to solve problems posed by them. He is a Visiting Scientist at the Australian eHealth Research Centre and created a similar educational program at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Previously he wrote Practitioner's Guide to Health Informatics (Springer 2015) and Contemporary Health Informatics (AMIA 2014). Dr. Braunstein isactively involved with HL7's development of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard. He earned a BS from MIT in 1969, an MD from the Medical University of South Carolina in 1974 and served as a resident at Washington University. He was a 1996 Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Southeast Region, received a 1995 Innovation in Medical Management Award from the American Society of Physician Executives and received the 2006 Founder's Award from the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Southeast Region. In 2013 he was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus by MUSC's College of Medicine.

Inhalt
Healthcare Delivery in the US.- Federal Policies and Initiatives.- Contemporary Informatics Tools.- Clinical Practice.- Patient-Centered Care.- Empowering the Patient.- Increasing Knowledge.- What's Next.