Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use 1st Edition

This is an wonderful book about the state of health IT today.It gives you a great sense of why things are the way they are today, who the players are, what their motivations are, what the conflicts are, and what options you have going forward. Developers new to the field absolutely must start by reading this book; there's just no coherent information on the internet that comes close to this. I suspect that veterans of the industry will learn many things as well.It's very well-written and thorough and somehow seems to mirror the way that I approach health IT issues as a developer. It has a few misspellings here and there, but these in no way affect my confidence in what is clearly invaluable information from experts.After a few chapters, I made a colleague buy the book immediately.

I'm taking a Management Information Systems class focused on HIT as part of my MBA and this book (though not required) was an excellent primer for the class and to have conversations with current HIT professionals to learn more.It provides a practical perspective and just enough technical detail to push you to pursue further information and understanding without demotivating you in a miasma of jargon.Well worth the money on the kindle!

This book is not an in-depth look at Meaningful Use mandates or requirements, but it is an invaluable primer spanning HIT and sets the context within which your exploration of Meaningful Use will make so much more sense. The chapter on Ontologies is so packed with information that I wish everyone in HIT and government and health sciences would read it. The quality of writing has me looking for more of Fred's publications. This book is very informative at a summary level, but it also connects the dots at that high level to expose the wonkiness of HIT and semantic interoperability. And THAT is one item that HIT pros must learn about to excel, whether via experience or study. Full endorsement of this book that is very pro-open source from a guy employed by a large commercial EHR vendor.

The positives: this book presents a lot of information, both current & historical, and ultimately manages to paint a picture of the healthcare IT landscape that is mostly complete.Negatives: oh my -There is a whole chapter describing meaningful use requirements, and specifically, outpatient clinical quality reporting measures, that could have been shortened to a tenth of the size of that chapter and taken out to a companion website. A not-so-minor nit - I understand the book was originally written in 2011 and I bought it in May 2014. It's unclear if this chapter has been updated since the original writing, because the term PQRI has since been retired in favor of PQRS, in yet another brilliant move on the part of the powers-that-be. The authors call this chapter an interactive guide - and I'm still trying to suss out how it can be interactive in the original print or the kindle version.The chapter on Ontologies is technically weak and rambling.Similarly, the chapter on Medical Billing, while illuminating, could have been much shorter. At times, it appeared as if the authors were being paid by the word and were taking full advantage of it.I expected to see more detail in the surprisingly short chapter on EHR technology history, but that was not to be. And it is neither comprehensive enough (leaves out several market leaders) nor has it been updated with changes in the EHR world since original publication.Summary:It is sad that this is arguably the best (or only) book introducing healthcare information technology to the rest of the world working in software and computers. It serves to perpetuate the notion that healthcare IT is a backwater of the software world, when instead, healthcare IT should be one of the areas leading the development of new advances in software.

The book was very helpful and informative for me. I've worked on the development of various health applications / websites for several years when I picked up the book, and a lot of things were already familiar. Still, the book provided a cohesive picture of various practices and explained where they came from. I especially appreciated the overview of patient encounter and billing as well as the chapters on ontologies and interoperability. Some things came in handy on the job later.If you are just starting out in health IT and terms like ICD, EHR, PHI, HITECH are new to you, get this book, it will help a lot. If you've been in the field for a while but specialized in one area, I think you still may find it useful.Can the book be improved, as other reviewers suggested? Perhaps. It's difficult for me to suggest specific improvements since it's been a couple of years since I've read it. However, I know that it was the only book of the kind when I looked a couple of years ago. You could information on medical billing and other things elsewhere, but that would require reading countless pages of very dry text. Which brings me to another point about the book: it's a quick read and it's great that it is.