Health Care Information Systems: A Practical Approach for Health Care Management, 2nd Edition

FOREWORD

Information systems (IS) constitute the source of many of the problems in the health care industry. Health care is one of the most transaction-intensive industries (estimated at thirty billion transactions annually), given all the encounters between patients and providers, providers and other providers, providers and insurers, suppliers and providers, and so on. Yet compared to other industries, health care has historically underinvested in IS—and it shows. The transactions between parties in health care take place not so much electronically as through a mixture of telephone, paper, fax, and EDI media. The result is that much information is never captured, is captured incorrectly, is captured inefficiently, or is difficult to retrieve ...