Product Review

Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity examines the complexities involved in managing resources in our healthcare system and explains how management theory and informatics applications can increase efficiencies in various functional areas of healthcare services. Delving into data and project management and advanced analytics, this book details and provides supporting evidence for the strategic concepts that are critical to achieving successful healthcare information technology (HIT), information management, and electronic health record (EHR) applications. This includes the vital importance of involving nursing staff in rollouts, engaging physicians early in any process, and developing a more receptive organizational culture to digital information and systems adoption.

We owe it to ourselves and future generations to do all we can to make
our healthcare systems work smarter, be more effective, and reach more
people. The power to know is at our fingertips; we need only embrace it.
               ―From the foreword by James H. Goodnight, PhD, CEO, SAS

Bridging the gap from theory to practice, it discusses actual informatics applications that have been incorporated by various healthcare organizations and the corresponding management strategies that led to their successful employment. Offering a wealth of detail, it details several working projects, including:

• A computer physician order entry (CPOE) system project at a North Carolina hospital
• E-commerce self-service patient check-in at a New Jersey hospital
• The informatics project that turned a healthcare system’s paper-based resources into digital assets
• Projects at one hospital that helped reduce excesses in length of stay, improved patient safety; and improved efficiency with an ADE alert system
• A healthcare system’s use of algorithms to identify patients at risk for hepatitis

Offering the guidance that healthcare specialists need to make use of various informatics platforms, this book provides the motivation and the proven methods that can be adapted and applied to any number of staff, patient, or regulatory concerns.