Ready to take your IT skills to the healthcare industry? This concise book 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.

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 settingsLearn the variety of ways institutions deal with patients and medical staff, and how workflows varyDiscover healthcare's dependence on paper records, and the problems involved in migrating them to digital documentsUnderstand how providers charge for care, and how they get paidExplore how patients can use EHRs to participate in their own careExamine healthcare's most pressing problem--avoidable errors--and how EHRs can both help and exacerbate it