Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care

Book Description Ready to take your IT skills to the healthcare industry? This concise book provides a candid assessment of the US healthcare system as it ramps up its use of electronic health records (EHRs) and other forms of IT to comply with the government’s Meaningful Use requirements. It’s a tremendous opportunity for tens of thousands of IT professionals, but it’s also a huge challenge: the program requires a complete makeover of archaic records systems, workflows, and other practices now in place.
This book points out how hospitals and doctors’ offices differ from other organizations that use IT, and explains what’s necessary to bridge the gap between clinicians and IT staff.

• Get an overview of EHRs and the differences among medical settings
• Learn the variety of ways institutions deal with patients and medical staff, and how workflows vary
• Discover healthcare’s dependence on paper records, and the problems involved in migrating them to digital documents
• Understand how providers charge for care, and how they get paid
• Explore how patients can use EHRs to participate in their own care
• Examine healthcare’s most pressing problem—avoidable errors—and how EHRs can both help and exacerbate it

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Content

1. Introduction
2. An Anatomy of Medical Practice
3. Medical Billing
4. The Bandwidth of Paper
5. Herding Cats: Healthcare Management and Business Office Operations
6. Patient-Facing Software
7. Human Error
8. Meaningful Use Overview
9. A Selective History of EHR Technology
10. Ontologies
11. Interoperability
12. HIPAA: The Far-Reaching Healthcare Regulation
13. Open Source Systems