Handbook of Research on Distributed Medical Informatics and E‐Health

Citation

MacDonald, R. (2009), "Handbook of Research on Distributed Medical Informatics and E‐Health", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 390-391. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520910951311

This handbook is a wide‐ranging and internationally flavoured collection of papers describing many aspects of distributed health care and biomedical informatics. The editors have assembled material that ranges from technically focused to almost philosophical in approach, and provided an exciting overview of the possibilities in store for the future of health information systems.

The book's 36 chapters are organised into ten sections:

1. 1.

   medical data and health information systems;

2. 2.

   medical standardisation and classification systems;

3. 3.

   distributed e‐health communication systems and applications;

4. 4.

   wireless telemedicine in healthcare;

5. 5.

   mobile health applications;

6. 6.

   medical imaging and distributed problem‐solving environments;

7. 7.

   medical decision support systems;

8. 8.

   medical virtual environments;

9. 9.

   data evaluation and validation; and

10. 10.

    legal, ethical, and health issues in e‐health.

Chapters within a section may be general discussions, e.g. on the assessment of medical information on the internet, or descriptions of the technical aspects of experimental or functioning e‐health solutions, e.g. RFID in hospitals. If a few contributions seem somewhat lightweight, most are heavily informative. However, the final section contains a curious item indeed: a paper warns of the health dangers of electrosmog (the environmental mélange of electromagnetic fields – presumably in this case generated by all the wireless networks associated with e‐health technologies), and supplies a definition of the mathematical field of chaos theory that notes “Without chaos there is no creativity and no evolution. A stable equilibrium would contradict the will of the Creator of the universe and of each person and soul”. Open‐mindedness may well be a virtue, but it was disturbing to read a paper discussing the quality of online health information, then soon afterward another that seems to be a mix of fringe medicine and pseudoscience.

The large contingent of contributions from non‐English‐speaking countries offers a useful glimpse of health informatics initiatives around the world – there are many papers here from Greece, Spain and other Western European countries, but also some from South America, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Malaysia and Mauritius. Unfortunately, many of these papers could have used some serious proofreading. For instance, on page 400 one paragraph starts out in English, then changes to Portuguese after a couple of lines, only to be followed by the English translation in the next paragraph. These sorts of mistakes can easily creep into a manuscript, but it is difficult to understand why some effort was not made to correct them in before production, partly for the sake of clarity, partly in recognition of the difficulties encountered by authors attempting to describe complex issues in a second language. In addition, there are apparently over 300 definitions of key terms included in the book; however, unlike the references, which are reprinted together in a separate section, particular definitions appear only at the end of a single chapter, and presumably must instead be found using the index. A quick check found that something as essential to the subject as the internet is not defined until page 455, and that “Internet” is not listed in the index. The reader is left with the feeling that, despite the efforts of the editors and contributors, more resources could have gone into producing such an otherwise interesting, informative and expensive book.