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.

Mark L. Braunstein, MD, is Professor of the Practice at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing where he teaches health informatics.  As Associate Director of the Institute for People and Technology he fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching directed at re-engineering the healthcare delivery system. At the Tennenbaum Institute he is involved in research in healthcare process mining.  At the Interoperability & Integration Innovation Lab (I3L), he is involved in community and industry outreach projects with lab partners aimed at more facile adoption of HIT to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery. He is also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and an invited contributor to the Information Week HealthCare blog. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2007, he founded several successful health IT companies and previously served on the faculty of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) where he developed one of the first functional ambulatory electronic medical record systems. He earned a BS degree from MIT in 1969, an MD degree from MUSC in 1974 and completed an internship in internal medicine at Washington University in 1975.