Guide to Health Informatics PDF

As with the first edition, the present edition of this book has been written for healthcare professionals who wish to understand the principles and applications of information and communication systems in healthcare. The text is presented in a way that should make it accessible to anyone, independent of their knowledge of technology. It should be suitable as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate training in the clinical aspects of informatics, and as an introductory textbook for those undertaking a postgraduate career in informatics.

It is said that books are never finished, but that they are just abandoned. The first edition was certainly never finished. Informatics is still exploring its shape as a principled science, and at some point it is more important to come to a view of what that shape is, rather than to await perfection. Unlike novelists, however, authors of textbooks are given the rare privilege of retelling their story in new editions, and changing their mind about what needs to be emphasized or how the story should unfold.

In this second edition I have kept the essential backbone of the informatics story the same. We start with foundational chapters that try to explain simply the abstract concepts that are core to informatics and subsequent chapters are built upon those foundations. Every chapter has been updated and many have been almost completely rewritten to reflect the emergence of new ideas and results. Each chapter now ends with a new element – questions intended to test the reader's understanding of the chapter or stimulate discussion of the material. Not all the answers to the questions are easy or obvious, and some are specifically designed to challenge.

A new set of chapters on clinical informatics skills forms Part 2 of this book and represents the major new element in this edition. I remain deeply conscious that practising clinicians need to translate knowledge into action, and in Part 2 I have attempted to identify those clinical activities that are essentially informatic – communicating, structuring information, asking questions, searching for answers, and making decisions. Informatics is as much about doing as it is about the tools we use in the doing, and I hope these new chapters will, once and for all, establish to clinicians why the study of health informatics is the foundation of all other clinical activities.New specialist chapters on biosurveillance and bioinformatics appear at the end of the book, representing areas where there has been a significant surge in research and development activity since the book was first written in 1996.

The change from ‘medical' to ‘health' informatics in the title does not represent a major change in emphasis of the text, but rather should make clearer to readers that the text is designed to be used by all healthcare professionals, including nurses and allied health professionals, and not just medical practitioners.When I use the term ‘clinician' in this book I am referring to any healthcare practitioner directly involved in patient care. I have kept the term electronic medical record (EMR) in the text more as a historical convenience than anything else, and the discussion of record-keeping and its principles is intended to be applied across all the health professions.

Finally, it may have seemed a foolhardy mission for a single author to attempt to write a comprehensive text on health informatics in 1997. I can assure you that in 2003 the task was significantly greater, and the sense of foolhardiness ever more present as I struggled to decide what material should come into a core introductory text, what to exclude, and tried to faithfully extract the major results form an ever-expanding literature.When it came to the bioinformatics chapter, which covers what has now become a discipline in its own right, I elected to call in the expert assistance of Zac Kohane rather than carry on unaided. I am indebted to Zac for providing me the material, drawn from his own excellent bioinformatics text, which is now assembled as Chapter 29.

My one guiding hope during this task was that as a single author I could still write with a single voice and keep the story coherent and simple.Most other informatics texts have multiple authors and usually suffer because of it. I hope that the clarity of this text makes up for any limitations in its comprehensiveness. As before, I hope that readers who find elements of the book they disagree with, or would like to see improved, take the time to let me know. I may one day contemplate a third edition!