Adaptive Health Management Information Systems: Concepts, Cases, & Practical Applications, 3rd Edition

Foreword

When I joined the health information world many years ago disc drives storing 5 to 10 megabytes of information and costing upward of $200,000 were the standard; central processing units with memories of 512K to 1024K and costing many thousands of dollars were the rule; elaborate climate-controlled environments costing tens of thousands of dollars were mandatory; elaborately trained operators were required to be present at all times that the technology was being used; and an online, real-time order entry system was rare and very expensive. At that time there were less than a dozen such systems in the United States that were actually working as true real-time order entry and data collection systems. Their computing power was probably less ...