I've been involved with health informatics since well before it was recognized as a useful field. Yes, that goes back to gigantic computers with virtually no horsepower or memory by today's standards. For example, my early electronic medical record ran on a DEC PDP-15 'minicomputer' (actually quite large) with 64,000 bytes of main (core) memory and twin 30 MB hard drives. We used the MUMPS programming language that is still the basis for Epic's EHR. Nevertheless, those of us in the field actually did useful work back then as I try to explain in the 2nd edition of Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's API is Transforming Healthcare. It is intended to provide a broad introduction to the field for readers from a variety of backgrounds. No technical skills required. It starts with a historical perspective and a brief review of the challenges facing healthcare delivery as we all live longer and develop chronic diseases. It then focuses on HL7's Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) API-based interoperability standard that is having an enormously positive impact on innovation in the field and, in my view, offers great promise for really helping to overcome the challenges I reviewed earlier. I provide numerous case studies to demonstrate why that is the case. They cover use cases to support patient care, public and population health and patient engagement; to improve payment processing; to provide FHIR infrastructure and tools; and to extend FHIR to represent not just data, but also medical knowledge. After over 20 years in the commercial health IT segment, I've began teaching at Georgia Tech in 2007 and remained involved as an emeritus faculty. I am also a visiting scientist at CSIRO's Australian eHealth Research Centre in Brisbane, where I'm involved in various projects and work with and teaching at the University of Queensland. In my spare time I love to cook and enjoy fine wine!
