Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Medical Informatics

Citation

Mutula, S.M. (2009), "Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Medical Informatics", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 1009-1010. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520911001981

The book is structured in six sections of two chapters each as follows: Section 1 – The Internet and Healthcare; Section 2 – Trust, Values, and Healthcare Information Systems; Section 3 – Responsibility and Healthcare Information Systems; Section 4 – Quality Management in Healthcare Information Systems; Section 5‐ Privacy and Data Protection Issues Regarding Electronic Healthcare Information; Section 6 – Emerging Technologies.

The book occupies a unique position in a wide range of similarly emerging titles on medical informatics because of its broad and comprehensive coverage of contemporary issues of ethical, legal, regulatory and technology nature in a single volume. The depth of treatment and analytical style in which the content is presented is inspiring. The book comprehensively presents hard aspects of medical informatics such as grid computing, connectivity, biometrics, sensors, implantations and close‐to‐body devices in the same way it does for soft issues of medical informatics including ethics, law, trust, privacy, safety and quality management, data protection, and national medical databases. The strengths of the book are reflected in its use of case studies, scenarios and problem‐solving approaches in presenting content. Going by the broad scope of the book within medical informatics, one would have expected to find topics related to knowledge management, communities of practice and learning organisations because of the increasing importance of information and knowledge sharing as well as social networks in medical informatics.

The chapters are written by several authors from different disciplinary backgrounds such as applied ethics, informatics, information systems, philosophy, law, information technology, computer science, economics, engineering and social anthropology. The diverse professional and academic expertise of the contributors coupled with the fact that they are drawn from different countries enriches the quality of content and gives the book a global perspective. However, representations from transitional and developing countries in terms of contributors and illustrative cases and scenarios are lacking, and this skews the book towards the developed world. This is not made any better by the fact that the book focuses on conventional medicine but ignores alternative medical practice.

The book is written in simple, jargon‐free English with chapters logically sequenced, making reading and relating different topics easy. Each chapter starts with an abstract and ends with a summary or conclusion. The final section of each chapter contains an extensive list of references for further reading. There is a subject index, though not elaborate enough given the technical nature of the subjects discussed. The lack of an author index is also a drawback. Nevertheless, the comprehensive list of references more than compensates for these shortcomings. A good attempt has been made in defining key concepts at point‐of‐use, but a separate glossary would enable the reader to quickly identify concepts sought, rather than searching for the context in which they are used. The use of illustrations is illuminating, but lack of colour obscures the clarity of figures.

The editors fail to provide a concluding chapter to synthesise the several issues discussed in the book. Also, it is not clear what the proposed audience is, although the impression is that it can be used by practitioners and academics in medical fields, computing, informatics, and health information systems. Notwithstanding a few omissions here and there, the book is worth reading and definitely provides value for money. I recommend this book for professionals, researchers and academics in the health sector and also stakeholders interested in matters of health information systems.