Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople (Health Informatics)

Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople provides essential information on person-centered healthcare systems that will serve individuals throughout their lifetime, enabling a new approach to wellness that goes far beyond outpatient visits to the physician’s office or hospitalizations. These health systems represent a profound transformation from the present healthcare system because they will enable individuals to protect and promote their own personal health. The center of the healthcare system will be those individuals – not the entities such as hospitals or physician groups. And the circle will encompass the full range of activities that contribute to wellness and to fighting disease – not just those services traditionally defined as "healthcare."

The book consists of three important sections. Section I addresses how the new person-centered system will change the way individuals care for their own health, giving them health records that accompany them throughout their lives, across the full range of experiences that affect their health. Section II lays out considerations involved in building new systems, including the need to address human factors such as control and ownership and the difficulties involved in relearning and learning to function in changed workflow environments. The third section focuses on approaches to transformation including focuses on delivering change, open source health systems, critical standards convergence, and person-centered systems now in place outside the United States. Chapter highlights include Clinical Impact, Human Factors, Health Security and Privacy, Critical Standards Convergence, and much more.

To represent the book’s depth and breadth, the editors have brought together contributors from varied health care sectors in the United States and elsewhere – public and private, not-for-profit and for-profit – to explicate the concept of the electronichealth record and to define the technological enablers that can make it a reality. The editors describe the concept involved in transformation, define the architectural issues and tools involved in building new person-centered systems, and describe the approaches that make it possible to integrate concept, architecture, and tools into person-centered health systems. Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople is a must-have for those with an interest in person-centered health systems that can be built using the Web and Web-based tools. Both business and technical leaders will benefit from reading this book.