For the several past years IT in healthcare has been enjoying ever growing attention from academic and commercial sectors. Multiple projects, specialized stages at the biggest tech conferences and constant talks about turning hospitals into smart systems able to take more customized care of their patients through connected devices — information technology seems to penetrate into all fields of clinical care. However, if you start looking for good books on health IT, you’ll quickly get lost: the topic is too versatile and too new for it to develop classics that would cover all aspects and topics and be useful for beginners and for experienced professionals.
That is why, in this post we’ll try to suggest our selection of books on main branches of health IT that can help you get insights into the field.
Health Information Technology
First things first: health IT is the field of knowledge dealing with the electronic exchange of health information. Professionals in this field implement processes related to electronic health records, electronic prescribing and interoperability of electronic medical records across multiple organizations.
Healthcare Information Technology Exam Guide for CHTS and CAHIMS Certifications
Author: Kathleen A. McCormick
Written from the perspective of IT professionals, this book prepares them to transition into Health IT covering the essentials from health data standards to project management. It gives a decent overview of past trends and innovations that will shape the future, such as complex platforms that support big data, genomics, telemedicine, mobile devices, and consumers. As big data, precision medicine, genomics, and telehealth are changing previous paradigms of architecture and functionality, the book gives the perspective implementing new trends without interrupting existing care processes and revenue cycles.
Why read?
If you are an IT professional starting to work in healthcare IT, the book will provide you with a thorough overview of fundamentals of Healthcare Information Science covering standards and regulations as well as the ways to implement, manage and optimize them.
Where to find?
Introduction to Healthcare Information Technology
Author: Mark Ciampa
Contrary to the previous book, this textbook addresses or medical professionals or technologists who want to gain entry into the field of healthcare information systems. The book covers the fundamentals of healthcare IT having the scope of the CompTIA Healthcare IT Technician as a basis. It examines healthcare regulatory requirements, the functions of a healthcare organization and its medical business operations as well as more applied topics such as IT hardware, software, networking, and security.
Why read?
This textbook provides the necessary foundation to enter the field of health IT and to pass the certificate exam.
Where to find?
Health informatics
Closely related to health IT, health informatics uses the data made by it to secure, organize and evaluate data related to patient care. Health informatics processes are intended to improve the delivery of public and private healthcare services.
Health Informatics: Practical Guide for Healthcare and Information Technology Professionals
Author: Robert E. Hoyt
Yet another textbook/reference book aiming to educate both healthcare and IT students and professionals about the key topics in health informatics. The topics covered include electronic health records, healthcare data analytics, health information exchange, architecture of information systems, evidence based medicine, consumer health informatics, HI ethics, and quality improvement strategies.
Why read?
Apart from theory, the book offers case studies, recommended reading, future trends, key points, and conclusions. Besides, for visual learners, it has simple illustrations to support textual explanation
Where to find?
Informatics for Health Professionals (Navigate 2 Advantage Access) 1st Edition
Authors: Kathleen Mastrian, Dee McGonigle
The aim of the book is to provide learners with a solid understanding of informatics and the way it may support practice, education, administration, and research in the field of healthcare. It overviews recent technology trends in cybersecurity, and ethics, healthcare information exchanges and knowledge management. Among topic it covers are data mining, mobile health, bioinformatics and many others.
Why read?
If you want solid theoretical background, this book will meet your expectations in full. Besides, the book offers a range of learning tools, including case studies, discussion questions and research briefs to see how the theories are implemented in the real life.
Where to find?
Amazon
Cybersecurity
In the recent years, the ethical and legal aspects of healthcare information management have been growing in importance, with more information stored online and more concerns about its security in public discussions. Responding to this trend, cybersecurity in healthcare has become one of the fastest growing field in healthcare IT.
Cybersecurity for Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities: A Guide to Detection and Prevention
Author: Luis Ayala
A book addresses, above all, hospital administrators, hospital and healthcare facility engineers IT professionals. It teaches how to detect potential threats and to prevent the hacking of medical equipment at hospitals and healthcare facilities. For this, the book tries to give the image of a hacker’s mind explaining what hackers can do, why they would target a hospital, how they research a target and gain access to a medical-grade network.
Why read?
The book prepares hospital and healthcare facility personnel to potential risks and provides ways to timely detect vulnerabilities and prevent hacking.
Where to find?
The Book on Healthcare IT: What you need to know about HIPAA, Hospital IT, and Healthcare Information
Author: James Scott
Though positioning itself as a textbook on health IT, this book focuses on cybersecurity and patient privacy. In a relatively simplified manner, it covers a range of topics on it, including options for encryption of personal health information, best practices in patient privacy protection, HIPAA requirements and compliance, prevention of fraud by healthcare insiders, wireless network security. As a case study, it provides an analysis of the Catholic Health System’s network and data security.
Why read?
This book addresses beginners without assuming any IT knowledge. The structure is plain and transparent: the author defines the issue and explains the easiest and most effective path to reach the desirable outcome.
Where to find?
AI for Healthcare
As any other AI-related topics, artificial intelligence in healthcare has been the focus of attention for the past several years. Since the topic is broad and covers many subjects from data analysis to deep learning algorithms, we have chosen two books that can raise the curtain on hottest and most promising fields of AI.
Medical Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Editor: Arvin Agah
The book helps both medical and computational scientists develop hybrid systems that can integrate the experience of healthcare professionals with capabilities of AI. The book gives a general overview of artificial intelligence concepts, tools, and techniques to familiarize readers with current trends and reviews the up-to-date research in the field.
Why read?
In a quite general way, the book captures the breadth and depth of the medical applications of artificial intelligence and sets the way for new developments.
Where to find?
Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare (Himss Book) 1st Edition
Authors: Prashant Natarajan , John C. Frenzel, Detlev H. Smaltz
The books studies how healthcare organizations can leverage big data to discover new business value, use cases, and knowledge. First of all, it tries to separate myths about big data from the reality to help medical professional develop a leveraged perspective on how big data can be used in healthcare. It gives insights on what type of data is needed, what key values in data preparation are. Importantly, it overviews main machine learning algorithms for healthcare.
Why read?
The book shows the way to create a knowledge-driven learning organization based on new and existing strategies, methods and technologies. Though it addresses long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics, it provides pragmatic recommendations on how to deal with them.
Where to find?
Healthcare IoT
Further expansion of the Internet of Things is listed among top trends for 2019. It is universally admitted that medicine is going to be one of the spheres to benefit from it making healthcare more reliable, fast and accessible.
Internet of Things and Advanced Application in Healthcare
Editors: Catarina I. Reis, Marisa da Silva Maximiano
This book is a reference source that covers the newly emerged research on the implementation of the latest networking and technological trends within the healthcare industry. It covers a broad range of topics related to the Internet of Things in healthcare, including context-aware computing, reliability, and healthcare support systems.
Why read?
In the emerging field of the healthcare IoT, this book provides a good reference to the key concepts.
Where to find?
Enterprise Internet of Things Handbook: Build end-to-end IoT solutions using popular IoT platforms
Author: Arvind Ravulavaru
The book give a very practical information on the IoT domain in healthcare, covering five most popular IoT platforms, namely, AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT, Google IoT Core, IBM Watson IoT, and Kaa IoT middleware. It helps build solutions that will use a Raspberry Pi 3, a DHT11 Temperature and humidity sensor, and a dashboard to visualize the sensor data in real-time. Moreover, it provides an overview of the Machine Learning in relation to the IoT guiding the reader through designing a simple predictive web service.
Why read?
The best about this book is that it is practice-oriented. By the end of it, the reader is supposed to be able to implement an IoT strategy best-fit for their organization
Where to find?
Since the field of the healthcare IT is still in its infantry in many respects, many books have either a futuristic slant showing potential benefits of IT for healthcare, or, on the contrary, are collections of well-established theories that quickly become outdated in this fast-growing field. In our review, we tried to collect books that give fundamental knowledge and key best practices. However, to get state-of-the-art information, it is always a good idea to search for specific articles.
