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Health Informatics in the Real World

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Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's API is Transforming Healthcare

Part of the book series: Health Informatics ((HI))

Abstract

In this chapter, we begin a discussion of the key informatics tools needed to power a Learning Health System. These include electronic records for both providers and patients as well as information sharing technologies to bind them together. There are two similar terms used to describe these records. Electronic medical records (EMRs) are best thought of as “the standard medical and clinical data gathered in one provider’s office”. In the early days of clinical information systems, before data sharing was feasible creating the EMR, as defined, was the goal. The newer term is electronic health record (EHR) and it contains a more complete record of a patient’s care. Increasingly, with the growth of mHealth (mobile health), it may also contain data contributed by the patients using mobile apps or wearable or other devices in the home.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The author was involved very early on in the effort to get the VA to adopt the MUMPS programming language to support what can be described as a very early ‘open source’ software development effort within the VA that eventually led to VistA.

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  1. School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Mark L. Braunstein

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Correspondence to Mark L. Braunstein .

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Braunstein, M.L. (2022). Health Informatics in the Real World. In: Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's API is Transforming Healthcare. Health Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91563-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91563-6_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91563-6

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