Sebastopol, CA—"Healthcare is going digital and that is going to change one of the most important aspects of our lives," says Fred Trotter (@fredtrotter), coauthor of Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care (O'Reilly Media, $19.99 USD). "For some of us, that will mean new jobs with new responsibilities, but for all of us, it will change how healthcare is delivered."

If you're ready to take your IT skills to the healthcare industry, Meaningful Use and Beyond 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.

"We are trying to computerize the last industry that has resisted computerization in a span of a few years," Trotter continues, "but there is a reason that healthcare has resisted basic computer technologies. As a nation, we have the funds to bring an army of people into the ranks of Health IT. But most books talk about Health IT as it should be rather than as it is.

"Geeks need to be able to understand why stuff that works in normal IT fails so badly in healthcare."

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