Two IT for Healthcare books

Two IT for Healthcare books:  BYOD for Healthcare by Jessica Keyes, CRC Press 2014, and Wi-Fi Enabled Healthcare, by Ali Youssef, Douglas McDonald II, Jon Linton, Bob Zemke, and Aaron Earle, CRC Press 2014

Of these two healthcare IT books, Keyes’ BYOD for Healthcare is the more readable resource, a great starting point.  Chapter 4, “Assessment and Mitigation of Risks in a BYOD Environment” is a key chapter that covers how to evaluate and prepare for risks, systems architecture, and risk assessments.  The author addresses security in other chapters as well, and takes the reader through necessary preparation for multiple device networks.  MIT’s Michael Schrage in fact predicts that IT systems will increase their Bring Your Own Device (and apps) approach so that many commonalities and rules supported in the old IBM-laptop era become irrelevant. 

In addition to the technical details of planning a secure and multi-device healthcare network, the author pulls in legal and regulatory features that must be designed into system architectures.

Most useful is a series of Quick Start guides that simplify the healthcare IT challenge.  The author also dedicates one six-plus page Appendix to Cloud Procurement.

Wi-Fi Enabled Healthcare is a technically more detailed reference, however, it’s history of Wi-Fi and final chapter, “Emerging Trends and Technologies,” made the material more readable. 

Readers will find coverage of emerging standards and growing legal regulatory considerations for healthcare, as well as discussion on security, encryption, passwords and other systems integrity issues.  The book looks as possible solutions for particular healthcare questions around devices, imagery, data transfer, retention and storage, along with the appropriate design considerations, cost/benefit points, and pros and cons. 

Healthcare institutions looking to integrate, or start fresh with updated system architecture would do well to review and research both of these healthcare IT books.  It’s interesting that the same basic security and integration issues now standing in front of healthcare may very well still exist for manufacturing professionals – certainly the proliferation of devices and database management challenges are the same for both sectors.