Customer Reviews

Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With a real need for "healthcare informatics", this is an excellent book and a must read...

"As a 20+ year healthcare IT professional working specifically on electronic health record (EHR) applications as well as the ongoing analysis of this data, I have come to realize the immense problems the healthcare industry is facing today because of the ongoing proliferation of data. With the seemingly endless stream of patient, doctor, healthcare provider, insurance company, and drug manufacture data, the industry has created a real void as well as an opportunity to tap into the huge data store in an attempt to bring real positive change regarding needed efficiencies to the industry. I have found that being able to frame this real life problem has been a challenge until reading Dr. Stephen Kudyba's excellent text "Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity".

I was amazed at how quickly and precisely Dr. Kudyba's text not only framed the problem but discussed possible solutions to tackling the problem as well as provided real life examples of applications and processes in use today which are addressing the problem head-on. He does a great job of going beyond theory to actual practice by identifying informatics applications that have been incorporated by healthcare organizations. Two examples in particular from the book which resonated with me was the example of an informatics project that turned a healthcare system's paper-based resources into digital assets as well as the example of the E-commerce self-service patient check-in application which was implemented at a New Jersey hospital. Honestly its one thing to discuss problems and propose possible solutions, but Dr Kudyba's book goes beyond that by identifying "real" solutions in use today.

Lastly, I found that this text serves as a groundbreaking, foundational textbook for a potential graduate course in healthcare data informatics. We cannot ignore the fact that informatics is at the heart of correcting many of the "ills" in healthcare, and because of this, Dr Kudyba's book is a must read!

In a forward to this book James Goodnight, CEO of SAS asks: "How is it possible that one of the largest economic forces and ethical priorities on the planet -healthcare- is not a leading example of using information technology?" It is clear to those working in the healthcare industry that the clinical and cultural transformation to health informatics has been painfully slow. This book is a well rounded work that talks about the recent initiatives that are addressing this issue, namely how information technology, information management, improving process efficiency and productivity are growing in importance in healthcare organizations. It addresses the business and operations side as well as the patient side.

Several noteworthy practitioners in various healthcare organizations have contributed to the book edited by Dr Stephan Kudyba. A major advantage of this collection of works entails the valuable information that contributors have shared on architecting, implementation, and optimization of healthcare informatics along with recommendations based on their experiences and case studies. Topics such as project management, electronic health records (EHR), computer physician order entry (CPOE), and nursing informatics are well covered. Informatics is not just about business processes and efficiency. The application of health informatics to improve patient safety and clinical outcomes are also discussed.

Healthcare executives (including CMIOs) interested in investment in information technology for best treatment and best outcome at least cost should definitely read this book. This book will be useful to managers in physician organizations, provider care organizations, and health insurance companies. Graduate students in business and information systems will find chapters on systems implementation, health analytics and data mining informative and interesting. It will give them an overview of health analytics and introduce them to data mining and data mining models. References at the end of each chapter should be helpful for further studies.

The intended audience for this book is hospital administrators--including CMIOs and chiefs of staff--that are needing to plan for buying and implementing healthcare information technology. The material covered is less comprehensive and more idiosyncratic than what is in Hoyt's Medical Informatics (4th edition 2010). There is a good overview of project managment although you're probably better off learning that from a good PM book or taking a course. The importance of utilizing nurses in implementation of an EHR is exhaustively discussed. An implemention of computer physician order entry (CPOE) in a hospital is presented in detail; this is the most useful part of the book and is recommended. Almost half the book is on analytics and data mining; these chapters are business- and research-oriented and I found them rather obvious.