O’Reilly news

Meaningful Use and Beyond--New from O'Reilly Media: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care

November 1, 2011

Sebastopol, CA—"Healthcare is going digital and that is going to change one of the most important aspects of our lives," says Fred Trotter (@fredtrotter), coauthor of Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care (O'Reilly Media, $19.99 USD). "For some of us, that will mean new jobs with new responsibilities, but for all of us, it will change how healthcare is delivered."

If you're ready to take your IT skills to the healthcare industry, Meaningful Use and Beyond provides a candid assessment of the US healthcare system as it ramps up its use of electronic health records (EHRs) and other forms of IT to comply with the government's Meaningful Use requirements. It's a tremendous opportunity for tens of thousands of IT professionals, but it's also a huge challenge: the program requires a complete makeover of archaic records systems, workflows, and other practices now in place.

"We are trying to computerize the last industry that has resisted computerization in a span of a few years," Trotter continues, "but there is a reason that healthcare has resisted basic computer technologies. As a nation, we have the funds to bring an army of people into the ranks of Health IT. But most books talk about Health IT as it should be rather than as it is.

"Geeks need to be able to understand why stuff that works in normal IT fails so badly in healthcare."

This book points out how hospitals and doctors' offices differ from other organizations that use IT, and explains what's necessary to bridge the gap between clinicians and IT staff.

  • Get an overview of EHRs and the differences among medical settings
  • Learn the variety of ways institutions deal with patients and medical staff, and how workflows vary
  • Discover healthcare's dependence on paper records, and the problems involved in migrating them to digital documents
  • Understand how providers charge for care, and how they get paid
  • Explore how patients can use EHRs to participate in their own care
  • Examine healthcare's most pressing problem—avoidable errors—and how EHRs can both help and exacerbate it

For a review copy or more information please email gretchen@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

About the Authors

Fred Trotter is a recognized expert in Free and Open Source medical software and security systems. He has spoken on those subjects at the SCALE DOHCS conference, OSCON, LinuxWorld, DefCon and is the MC for the Open Source Health Conference. Trotter has a B.S in Computer Science, a B.A in psychology and a B.A in philosophy from Trinity University. Trotter minored in Business Administration, Cognitive Science, and Management Information Systems. Before working directly on health software, Trotter passed the CISSP certification and consulted for VeriSign on HIPAA security for major hospitals and health institutions. Trotter was originally trained on information security at the Air Force Information Warfare Center.

View Fred Trotter's full profile page.

David Uhlman is CEO of ClearHealth Inc. which created and supports ClearHealth, the first and only open source Meaningful Use certified Comprehensive Ambulatory EHR. Coming from a background of supply chain systems and big business ERP for companies including DEC, Micro Systems, Motorola, and EDS, David entered health care in 2001 as CTO for the OpenEHR project. One of the first companies to try commercializing open source healthcare systems, OpenEHR met face first with the difficult realities of bringing proven mainstream technologies into the complicated and sometimes nonsensical world of health care. In 2003 David became CEO of ClearHealth and created the ClearHealth system based on VistA that was originally developed by the Veterans Health Administration.

View David Uhlman's full profile page.

Additional Resources
For more information about the book, including table of contents, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920020110

Meaningful Use and Beyond Meaningful Use and Beyond
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
By Fred Trotter, David Uhlman
Print ISBN: 9781449305024   Ebook ISBN: 9781449305017  
Pages: 248
Print Price: $19.99   Ebook Price: $14.99  
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

Request Review copy

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

Email a link to this press release