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Computerization has come slowly to the medical industry, but it is now apparent that computers and medical informatics are essential to its survival. Given the largeness and complexity of modern health delivery, its regulatory and administrative burdens, and of course its financial pressures, it is inescapable that computers will be brought to bear throughout the system in every conceivable stage of patient care and management.
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We are now 20 years into the era of the personal computer and somewhat less than that into the Internet era, which means that something like half of today's active healthcare workers started their careers before computers had much to do with patient care. In addition, very few of the other, younger, half has had any formal training in computer science.
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Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals are commonly well versed in, and facile with, complex technology used in modern diagnostic and therapeutic medicine. Computers and informatics are oddly separated from this comfort zone. Given the industry's increasingly reliance on informatics, and the lack of familiarity among many health professionals with basic principles and fundamental applications, a primer of the essentials for non-IT specialists can serve a helpful purpose.
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This book is designed to provide physicians, nurses, and ancillary medical workers with an introduction to computers and medical informatics as they relate to the clinical environment. The first half of the book is generally focused on topics having to do with computers and networking. The second half is more specifically focused on medically oriented topics and concludes with my vision of what the very near future holds in medical computing. Each chapter ends with a number of references for further investigation for readers so inclined.
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C. William Hanson III, MD