Fred Trotter - Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care

Copyright 2011 Fred Trotter and David Uhlman

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Weve directed our writing mostly at computer professionals, but this book can still be valuable for doctors, other clinicians, and other staff at healthcare institutions as well. We occasionally use terms from computer science and programming that will be familiar to people from those fields and might not be known to other readers. But we think that even the general reader can skip over technical details that he or she doesnt understand, and learn a lot about how to talk to other people about computers and networking in healthcare.

The chapters in this book are as follows.

An overview of the topics of this book, a discussion of differences between medical settings, and an overview of meaningful use, which will be fleshed out later in the book

The wide variety of ways healthcare settings deal with patients and staff, and how workflows vary

A candid investigation into how providers charge for care and how they get paid

An explanation of how deeply embedded paper records are in U.S. clinical settings, and what you need to do to migrate to electronic records

A review of what happens just outside the doors of the treatment room where administrative and IT staff perform traditional business operations

A detailed look at how patients can use technology to become participants in their own care, including such notions as personal health records, online communities, and the quantified self

A discussion of the most pressing problem in healthcare: avoidable errors, and how electronic records can both help and exacerbate the problems

A concise breakdown of the requirements for becoming meaningful use compliant

It is not possible to cover every important event in the history of a technology, but this discusses some of the highlights.

Vocabularies, jargon, classification systems for diseases and treatments, and other elements of making sense of information

A review of the technologies to exchange electronic healthcare records and the processes and systems that enable the process

When is health data covered under HIPAA, and what does that mean for your technology deployments?

Several comprehensive and fully featured systems exist to permit meaningful use compliance while using only open source software; these offerings provide an important reference and public resource for understanding meaningful use in technological terms or for real-world use

A checklist to help you determine how close your institution is to becoming meaningful use compliant

The following typographical conventions are used in this book: