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. 

“This book is appropriate for all those interested in healthcare information systems. It is specifically written for physicians, as a quick overview of the legal and political landscape of health informatics systems as implemented in the US. Non-US readers might find the book interesting as a means of comparing the developments in this country with the developments in other parts of the world.” (Carla Sánchez Aguilar, Computing Reviews, computingreviews.com, June, 2016)

“Braunstein (health informatics, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech) presents an excellent, wide-ranging review of such systems. … This volume will be useful for students of informatics generally as well as for those in the medical field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.” (R. A. Brugna, Choice, Vol. 53 (6), February, 2016)

Advance Praise for Practitioner’s Guide to Health Informatics:

"Dr. Braunstein has managed to take what is traditionally a dense and occasionally untranslatable topic and to frame it in an informal, conversational, and accessible style. Well done!

The book begins with a carefully constructed and well referenced discussion about the healthcare system and the current regulatory climate developed to help transform it. The section on HIE is one of the most comprehensive I have seen. Dr. Braunstein smartly goes into detail about methods to achieve interoperability before delving into standards. He summarizes each chapter, and builds upon what has been learned from previous chapters, to make sure the reader is able to appreciate how these chapters are connected. Although many of these chapters contain highly technical descriptions, the text smartly allows users to circumvent these sections without a loss of flow or a need to refer back to the technical areas. The book is replete with pictures, references and quotations that will allow any reader to delve more deeply into virtually every chapter.

This book will be a terrific introduction to the field of clinical IT and clinical informatics, and is a welcomed addition to the materials we have as instructors in this field."

- Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS is a Professor and Chair of  Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

"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, and highlighting how these trends are likely to both play out and influence the evolution of current and future health IT systems.  This book is accessible to non-technical as well as technical readers, and is a valuable read for any health care practitioner and health care executive, and for those individuals contemplating research and development or entrepreneurial opportunities in this domain."

- Robert A. Greenes, MD, PhD, Ira A. Fulton Chair and Professor, Professor Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University

"This insightful book is a perfect primer for technologists entering the health tech field."

- Deborah Estrin, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Tech, Professor of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College   

"Producing sharable digital data from care delivery and actually sharing it is arguably the single most important contribution health informatics can make to better healthcare in our country," is the way Dr. Braunstein starts this eminently practical yet very detailed look at what our country needs from the field of medical informatics. He has produced a minor masterpiece of analysis and explanation about the use of computers in medicine and health care delivery, one that isas useful for the informed lay person as it is for any clinical professional needing a brief overview of the field. This book should be read by everyone."

- David C. Kibbe, M.D., M.B.A. Director, Center for Health Information Technology, American Academy of Family Physicians, President and CEO, Co-founder DirectTrust.org

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.