Towards 2000 | |
Guide to medical informatics, the internet and telemedicine. Enrico Coiera. London: Chapman & Hall Medical 1997 (376pp.). ISBN: 0 412 75710 9 |
This immensely readable
and practical book provides an excellent overview for Australian clinicians with an interest in the likely impact that advances in information technology and telecommunications will have on all our professional lives. It is designed as an introductory text and provides easily digestible outlines of the basic concepts in medical informatics as well as challenging insights into the thinking behind our current and future clinical practice. The author is an Australian medical graduate who subsequently completed a PhD in computer science and now works at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol (United Kingdom) developing the next generation of technological solutions for healthcare. He adopts a very practical approach, with a focus on the needs of the end-users of information systems and how such systems can be either allies or enemies of health professionals. Each section of the book examines the possibilities, the practicalities and the desirabilities of current and emerging technological solutions to problems in healthcare. The section on the internet discusses how "the rise of the internet presents us with a defining moment at the end of the millennium" and the impact that this conjunction of technological and social forces will have on healthcare delivery. The section on medical terminology succeeds remarkably well in providing an understandable outline of the terminology and coding systems used in healthcare. I particularly enjoyed the insights into how new technologies might assist our clinical practice in the "interrupt-driven" environment of our teaching hospitals. This focuses on the development of mobile technologies to allow simple capture and retrieval of clinical data and communication with colleagues at the point of care. The text concludes with a discussion of intelligent clinical decision support and outlines how artificial intelligence techniques might be used to augment, if not replace, our clinical role in the next century. Overall, this is an insightful book which presents thought-provoking challenges for us all. Michael R Kidd
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