Guide to Medical Informatics, the Internet and Telemedicine

Rating:
Summary: A Great Place to Start in Medical Informatics
Review: This book is a good place to start if you're unsure of medical informatics and need some direction. It's helpful to get the book, read it, and then go to the references for further information on the topics that interest you.

I found the book surprisingly readable - the authors style makes it easy to read chapter after chapter with relative ease, far more so than other medical informatics books available. It's not an exhaustive book by any means, but I couldn't recommend a better place to test the water, and see if there's anything in Medical Informatics that grabs you.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Place to Start in Medical Informatics
Review: This book is a good place to start if you're unsure of medical informatics and need some direction. It's helpful to get the book, read it, and then go to the references for further information on the topics that interest you.

I found the book surprisingly readable - the authors style makes it easy to read chapter after chapter with relative ease, far more so than other medical informatics books available. It's not an exhaustive book by any means, but I couldn't recommend a better place to test the water, and see if there's anything in Medical Informatics that grabs you.

Rating:
Summary: A good overview of medical informatics
Review: This book provides a good overview of medical informatics. The concepts are introduced in a logical fashion, so that the chapters build on one another. I would recommend it to others as an introductory text. I wished for greater detail in some of the chapters (such as the ones on coding). I also found some of his explanations of models confusing/overly complicated. The chapter on the internet I found least helpful, perhaps because it provided little new information for me. The last section, on intelligent clinical decision support, was very sketchy, and the different approaches not well explained. This was especially true of the chapter on intelligent systems. On the minor complaint side, I found the lack of clear paragraph distinctions irritating, and some of the figures added nothing to the text and could have been left out.

Overall, it is a reasonable, readable, introduction to a broad subject.

Rating:
Summary: Superb introduction and overview
Review: This is the finest overview of medical informatics in print. Most such texts discuss the issues within informatics and approaches toward their solution. Coiera provides a cogent discussion of why the issues arise, how they interact with each other, and what they mean for clinicians and informaticians. The author's thought and language are remarkably clear and engaging. The discussion is set squarely in the context of healthcare (although more concrete clinical examples would aid clinicians who come to the book at the beginning of their work in informatics). It is informed by a deep understanding of research in medical informatics and computing. The book is an excellent introduction to the subject for clinicians, and I know very few informaticians whose understanding of the field and the specific problems within it would not be deepened and enriched by reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Superb introduction and overview
Review: This is the finest overview of medical informatics in print. Most such texts discuss the issues within informatics and approaches toward their solution. Coiera provides a cogent discussion of why the issues arise, how they interact with each other, and what they mean for clinicians and informaticians. The author's thought and language are remarkably clear and engaging. The discussion is set squarely in the context of healthcare (although more concrete clinical examples would aid clinicians who come to the book at the beginning of their work in informatics). It is informed by a deep understanding of research in medical informatics and computing. The book is an excellent introduction to the subject for clinicians, and I know very few informaticians whose understanding of the field and the specific problems within it would not be deepened and enriched by reading it.