Health IT as a Tool for Prevention in Public Health Policies examines the current state of Health Information Technology (HIT) in the United States. It investigates the converging problems of chronic disease, societal welfare, childhood obesity, and the lack of healthcare for the economically disadvantaged in the U.S. It considers various providers of care for disadvantaged groups and outlines innovative public policy solutions to a wide range of community problems.
The book starts by detailing the major problems the U.S. has faced with its healthcare system. Next, it describes current federal efforts to solve these problems and unveils novel solutions to these challenges. Each chapter examines a different technological solution that the U.S. is currently investing in and allocating time, resources, and energy to.
Supplying a basic theoretical foundation on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the book discusses the effects of geographic disparities and HIT at the meso, macro, and micro levels of society. It also demonstrates how individuals can use a range of HITs to improve prevention of health concerns, including mobile health apps, video games, self-management technologies, crowdsourcing, and other e-health technologies.
The book describes HIEs, RHIOs, and NHIN and explains how they connect to Community Health Centers (CHCs). It also explains how CHCs can use HIT to improve care for the disadvantaged and Medicaid population. It includes a case study of electronic health literacy and cancer patients and another on how equipping private practice physicians with EMRs can help them tackle prevention and improve organizational functioning.
The book concludes by providing a comparative perspective between the use of HIT in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and by suggesting the direction that the U.S. should take toward cloud-based solutions to its e-health infrastructure.
Divya Srinivasan Sridhar works in the field of public policy. She has developed her knowledge and experience at a number of public policy organizations including the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), National Housing Trust (NHT), Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Verité Healthcare Consulting (VHC), and more. She has delved into a variety of public policy issues during her internships and graduate programs, and has published and written papers on electronic government, social policy, and healthcare, including health reform, healthcare IT, and health informatics. She completed her bachelor's degree at Texas A&M University in Finance, her master's degree in Public Policy from UT (University of Texas) Dallas, specializing in social policy/health policy research, and is now working on her PhD in Public Policy at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Srinivasan is the author of Impact of Healthcare Informatics on Quality of Patient Care and Health Services (CRC Press, 2013).
