From Patiente Data to Medical Knowledge: The Principles & Practice

How can you make best use of patient data to improve health outcomes? More and more information about patients’ health is stored on increasingly interconnected computer systems. But is it shared in ways that help clinicians care for patients? Could it be better used as a resource for researchers?

This book is aimed at all those who want to learn about how IT is transforming the way we think about medicine and medical research. The ideas explored here are taken from research carried out around the world, and are presented by a leading authority in Health Informatics at University College London.

This comprehensive guide to the field is split into three sections:

• What is health informatics? – an introduction
• Techniques for representing and analysing patient data and medical knowledge
• Implementation in the clinical setting: changing practice to improve health care outcomes

Whether you are a health professional, NHS manager or IT specialist, this book will help you understand how data can be managed to provide the information you and your colleagues want in the most helpful and accessible way for both you and your patients.

Contents

Part One: Three Grand Challenges for Health Informatics
1 Introduction
2 Reading and writing patient records
3 Creation of medical knowledge
4 Access to medical knowledge

Part Two: The Principles of Health Informatics
5 Representation
6 Logic
7 Clinical terms
8 Knowledge representation
9 Standards in health informatics
10 Probability and decision-making
11 Probability and learning from data

Part Three: Achieving Change
12 Information technology and organisational transformation
13 Achieving change through information
14 Achieving change through information technology
15 Conclusions

Index