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

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.

I just moved into "Health Informatics" (a little over a year ago) as a programmer at a startup. Most of my time is spent dealing with the kind of thing you expect to deal with as a programmer, but frequently you have to "touch" the totally messed up world of Healthcare IT, and it usually sucks. I have spent an inordinate amount of my free time attempting to Google information to get a footing, only to find worthless management-oriented information or, or specification sites *cough* HL7 *cough* locked behind outrageous IP-paywalls. The books that are out there are ALL targeted at managers or health pros, not technologists.This book is a, pretty much fabulous, bootstrap. I wish I had found it, well, about 9 months before it was published.The one failing of the book is the targeting of the audience. The subtitle belies the writing in the book, which is targeted at a wider audience. I would say that if it were truly a "Guide for IT Staff" the back half of the book would be twice as long as it is, and the front half as long. It shouldn't be "making apologies" to IT people and encouraging them to skip sections that explain things in "Your Mom" language, it should pony up and drop the tech. The coverage of the various specs is hand-wavy and overly conceptual. The only thing I would say was spot-on perfect was the overview of the various ontological specs in the field, which cover almost exactly what you need to know and where to get more (though the discussion of Cyc felt a bit like nerd-preening on the part of the author. We all know it is there, thanks). In my own painful experience, discussion, for instance, of HL7 without discussion of transport is worthless. The dismissal of the conceptual problems of the HL7 XML stuff, without noting that it is an idiotically hackish shoveling of the "old" HL7 into XML presumes someone is already steeped in the idiocy of the current Health IT world before getting up to speed on "the new stuff".In spite of how harsh that last graph seems, even to me, I told everyone in my organization to buy it. It isn't perfect, but it is definitely the best bootstrap on the topic I have seen.

I am a professor of health informatics at one of the largest universities in the US and I've just made this book mandatory reading for my graduate students. The best part of this book is the way it relates workflow in healthcare delivery, accounting (billing & insurance), and administration to the systems elements. While the book says it is targeted at experienced IT professionals making the transition to health informatics (like me) it would be entirely suitable for experienced health IT staff or beginners. The book does an excellent job of integrating the implications of the Affordable Care Act and the HiTech Act. Again, I cannot emphasize enough the tight integration between workflow and systems in the book.Here's just one little tidbit the book discusses: The authors point out that while in most systems gender is a binary field with values of either Male or Female in healthcare the value of a gender field can take on many more than two values and can also have a history of values (just like HIV status or a number of other fields most individuals would consider as binary). Now this is not something we couldn't have figured out on our own but the authors' presentation also introduces a way of thinking and investigation that goes well beyond this one fact.And the price makes this book an absolute no-brainer for anyone in the field.

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.