Fred Trotter and David Uhlman - Hacking Healthcare

] These recruits to healthcare will bring valuable lessons learned through work in online commerce sites, financial institutions, or large corporate and university campuses, but they will be fundamentally bewildered during their first year or so at a hospital or clinic.

Meaningful use is the focus of this book because it is the term used in the Health Care Reform and Health IT Stimulus Act (HITECH, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) to encompass a vision of improved healthcare through computerization and digital networks. Theres a great deal of nervousness among U.S. healthcare providers about meaningful use. Can they push their organizations into the twenty-first century vision it represents? Will their IT systems really support it, and even if certified for meaningful use this year, will the systems support it in the future? And even if hospitals and clinics adhere to the letter of the law, will they really reap the benefits promised by health IT?

So meaningful use, for us, stands for much more than a set of requirements in a particular set of U.S. regulations. It represents a form of care that empowers the patient, that does not harm her, that promotes long-term health, and that is affordable for everyone. To realize this vision, IT staff in hospitals and clinics have to understand how their particular institutions work and what roles they play.

This book, so far as we know, is the first candid attempt to bridge the gap between clinicians and IT staff. It explains the factors that make healthcare settings different from other jobs and academic settings that computer staff may have come fromand that make the healthcare settings different from each otherso that readers enter these settings with a deep respect for their practices. We will not be reticent about sources of resistance to new computing opportunities. But we will give you a starting language for discussing the path to and beyond meaningful use.

We dont delve too deeply into technical details here, because they are fast changing. If we explained how to set up S/MIME for a direct email gateway, you might find that better options already exist when you get into the workplace. If we explained how to interact with the fields of a CCD, you would probably find that these fields are undergoing constant change and that much of the data you deal with requires a different format. So this is a different type of technical book: a book that gives you a context for choosing and implementing the right technology for your organization.