Major technical issues in medical informatics computer technology systems and applications

Technical issues in medical informatics are addressed, with emphasis on tools for medical practitioners to willingly and effectively use computers to capture data and to access information; the conversion of paper records to electronic data to facilitate automation; and system and application integration based on patient medical documents and information. It is pointed out that the computer and communication technologies are sufficiently advanced to provide solutions to these problems. Practical solutions are discussed which use friendly computer user interface tools such as speech, gesture and handwriting recognition with a tablet or notepad computer. Painless transitions of paper record to image, to electronic form and to data, and an optical-disk-based patient medical document are also discussed