HIT Considerations: Informatics and Technology Needs and Considerations

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore and consider many of the technical, data and knowledge issues that impact electronic health records. These issues include healthcare standards and semantic interoperability, security of applications and data, privacy of information, the ability to identify uniquely a participant across all healthcare domains, usability and context based information retrieval, and clinical decision support. These generally applicable informatics issues are then examined with a specific focus on the overall goal of integrating medical and dental health information. Thus, we also examine standards specific to dentistry, the data needs of dentists, and clinical dental decision support efforts.