Colleagues - this book may be of interest

Jeannette Murphy

From Patient Data to Medical Knowledge by Dr Paul Taylor, is a new text book, aimed primarily at the increasing number of people who study Health Informatics in postgraduate courses. (Publisher: Blackwell)

The book has three parts. The first consists of an introductory chapter and three further chapters each of which deals with one of  `Grand Challenges' identified for Health Informatics. This part provides a broad introduction to the field of Health Informatics. The second part deals various techniques used in Health Informatics and the theory behind some of them. A key element of this is the question of how we can represent clinical concepts in computer programs such as electronic health care records or decision support systems.

Many applications of health informatics can be seen as drawing on techniques from computer science, which, in turn, are based on logic. The book provides a brief introduction to logic and then to subjects which, in some sense, involve the application of logic: controlled clinical terminology, knowledge representation, ontologies and clinical standards. By way of a contrast, probability is discussed in two chapters, one of which deals with decision making and the other with statistics, an element in research but also in machine learning and data mining.

The final part of the book explores attempts to apply health informatics in practice. This includes a chapter on theories of organizational change and two further chapters, one dealing with attempts to change clinical practice by improving the dissemination of information and one on the change management issues raised by attempts to introduce new technology into healthcare organizations.

"I hope that the book will be of interest to anyone who has cause to think about how we use information in healthcare and I have tried not to make assumptions of any form of prior knowledge about information, information technology, computer science or healthcare. I live and work in the UK and the overwhelming majority of my students have been employees of the NHS. Many of the examples I discuss are drawn from this experience. I hope however that the subject and the themes are nevertheless relevant to a wider audience."

Paul Taylor is the Programme Director for the CHIME MSc Programme