The book we review here was written by Enrique Coiera, an Australian physician specialized in Medical Informatics, presently working in England. According to the author, the book is instructional and oriented to "health professionals who want to understand the principles of information and communication systems and applications in health care. The book serves also as an introductory text for those who want to follow a graduate career on (medical) informatics", although it "assumes little or no familiarity with medical informatics and technology".
The book is subdivided into seven parts and 21 chapters, which follow a logical progression, from simple information record systems to the most complex ones, Artificial Inteligence based medical systems.
In the first part, the author uses a novel approach to introduce Informatics to the readers, by describing it according to three essential levels: models, information and systems. Once these concepts have been established, the author deals, in the second part, with the fundamental aspects of information systems in health care, especially the computerized medical record, giving also notions on how to plan and to build clinical information systems. In the third part the book presents protocol based systems ("a set of instructions"), which are used a lot in Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), such as clinical consensus reports, clinical guidelines and medical care pathways.
In the fourh part, Coiera covers language systems, codification and nomenclature in Medicine, like ICD, SNOMED, DRGs, UMLS, etc. which are very important for the organization of computerized medical records. In a very interesting chapter, the author discusses what are the main codification problems and their future in Medicine.
In the fifth and sixth parts, the book deals with telecommunication systems in health (local networks, telemedicine and global networks, like the Internet, etc). On Internet, Coiera discusses it as a technological, social, economic and institutional phenomenon, and he presents the World Wide Web (WWW), its origins, how it works, how it is used to publish, disseminate and access knowledge, its caractheristics that allow for distance collaboration and the many applications that it can have on health care.
Finally, in the last part, the author describes intelligent clinical decision support systems, discussing the many existent applications and methodologies (specialist systems, artificial neural networks, monitoring and control, etc.).
The author has accomplished in this book a good balance between the material's technical complexity and the necessity to be didactic. It is not a book about practical tips, but rather the main emphasis is put on basic principles and models that represent a good start for those who want to get, later on, a deeper treatment on the topics. In addition to that, the range of topics covered by the book means that no area has got an in-depth treatment.
Enrico Coiera's email is ewc@pobox.com
and his homepage is located at http://www.pobox.com/~enrico.coiera
Published
by:
Center for Biomedical Informatics State University of Campinas, Brazil © 1997 Renato M.E. Sabbatini |
Sponsored
by:
Searle Brazil |