Introduction to Healthcare Informatics, 2nd Edition

ISBN: 9781584265283
ISBN-10: 1584265280
Copyright: 2017
Edition: 2nd
Author: Biedermann, Sue, Dolezel, Diane,
Doody's Expert Review    Score: 84
Reviewer: David Liebovitz,  MD  (University of Chicago Medicine)
Description
This is a second edition of an introduction to healthcare informatics. The chapters are assembled consistently and clearly with review questions and case examples. An accompanying website provides seven PDF files with additional details on the topics addressed in the book. The first edition was published in 2013.
Purpose
The purpose is to provide new health information professionals with an introduction to the field of healthcare informatics. This is a worthy purpose and this update should expand access to these foundational topics. The book achieves its goal by focusing on introductory material across a reasonable breadth of topic areas.
Audience
The audience is health information professionals. Topics of direct interest to physicians and some other clinicians are not covered to the level that might be expected, including documentation, decision support, and evidence-based medicine applications. However, for nonphysician health information professionals, the topics are covered at an introductory level and the book meets the needs of its audience, especially those new to the field.
Features
This book covers foundational elements of healthcare informatics at an introductory level. Nicely, the book is visually appealing and effective with a consistent layout encompassing learning objectives, terms, self-test questions, and case studies. The book does a nice job covering a range of topics with appropriate figures and case studies helping to illustrate the concepts. Examples of areas covered include electronic health records, privacy, security, ethics, data management and quality, information exchange, and consumer health informatics. Although the book is introductory, some additional discussion of patient safety as an explicit topic and of expanding future trends to better encompass machine learning and model development with examples from population health would have been helpful.
Assessment
This book provides a reasonable introduction to the field of healthcare informatics for new health information professionals. This update is justified to capture the rapid evolution in this area, and statistics and references appear appropriately updated.
Review Questionnaire
Range Question Score
1-10 Are the product's objectives met? 10
1-5 Does the website help achieve the purpose? 3
1-10 Rate the worthiness of those objectives. 10
1-5 Is this directed to an appropriate level? 5
1-5 Is there significant duplication? (1=significant, 5=insignificant) 4
1-5 Are there significant omissions? (1=significant, 5=insignificant) 4
1-5 Rate the authority of the authors. 5
1-5 Are there sufficient illustrations? 5
1-5 Rate the pedagogic value of the illustrations. 5
1-5 Are there sufficient references? 5
1-5 Rate the currency of the references. 5
1-5 Rate the helpfulness of the index. 5
1-5 Rate the added value from the online version. 2
1-5 Is the online version easy to access? 4
1-5 Rate the ease of navigation/search. 3
1-5 Rate the pedagogic quality of images on the online version. N/A
1-5 Rate the value of added audiovisual features online. N/A
1-5 Is there sufficient use of hypertext links? 1
1-5 Are there hyperlinks from references to journal articles? 1
1-5 Is there appropriate use of features like bookmarking, printing/exporting? N/A
1-10 Is this a worthwhile contribution to the field? 10
1-10 If this is a 2nd or later edition, is this new edition needed? 10