The Book on Healthcare IT Volume 2

The Book on Healthcare IT: What you need to know about Health Informatics, Hospital IT, EHR, HIE and Healthcare Information Technology Volume 2 brings you a complete and up-to-date overview of the key issues related to the adoption and use of information technology, communications and healthcare, with detailed practical information to support students, professionals and other stakeholders in the field of healthcare. Health Informatics, an evolving specialization, strives to improve the quality and safety of patient care. This book addresses the concepts, tasks and skills that professionals need to achieve the nation's targets for health care, and cover several aspects of healthcare operations, broadly - privacy, security, ethics, new technologies, mHealth, best practices and quality improvement. You will find detailed discussions about the best practices followed in the healthcare industry towards achieving the goal of better care and "meaningful use." Several strategies for prevention of data breaches are offered as the move towards EHRs and HIEs has opened up additional fields of concern, mainly related to the storage and sharing of digital data with the risk of loss of privacy and security of patient information. This book discusses ethical issues and ways of mitigating the risks involved concerning outsourcing and sharing information as the healthcare industry is now outsourcing certain services to focus on their core competency and to provide better care to patients. With Health Informatics, hospitals are rapidly moving towards implementation of newer technologies that support their functions more effectively and efficiently. Read about the use of third platform technologies such as clouds and mobile devices, telephone channels and the Web, along with use of Big Data and Analytics capabilities. All these fields are extremely important individually, and this book effectively discusses how their uniform use helps improve modern health care. Learn about different architectures used by information systems. Moving forward, this helps in understanding how hospitals are using different tools and strategies for improving the quality of healthcare they offer patients as the industry moves towards the post-EHR era with Evidence Based Medicine.