Himss Book

Healthcare transformation requires us to continually look at new and better ways to manage insights - both within and outside the organization today. Increasingly, the ability to glean and operationalize new insights efficiently as a byproduct of an organization's day-to-day operations is becoming vital to hospitals and health systems ability to survive and prosper. One of the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics has been the ability to deal with the sheer variety and volume of disparate healthcare data and the increasing need to derive veracity and value out of it.

This book addresses several topics important to the understanding and use of data in healthcare. First it provides a formal explanation, based on epistemology (theory of knowledge) of what data actually is, what we can know about it and how we can reason about it. The culture of data is also covered and where `data' fits into culture. Then data quality is addressed with a historical appreciation and new concepts and insights derived from the authors 35 years' experience in technology.

The author also provides a description of what healthcare data analysis is and how its changing in the era of almost unlimited data. Just as important is the topic of what infrastructure is used to provide capability for data use. The book also describes how healthcare information infrastructure needs to change in order to provide for current and future needs. The topics of AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning in healthcare are also addressed. The author concludes with thoughts on the evolution of the role and use of data and information going into the future.