Guide to Medical Informatics, the Internet and Telemedicine

Enrico Coiera Chapman and Hall Medical, £29.99, pp 376 ISBN 0 412 75710 9

Cybermedicine

Warner Slack Jossey-Bass Publishers, £15.95, pp 214 ISBN 0 7879 0343 4

In his Guide to Medical Informatics, the Internet and Telemedicine Enrico Coiera defines medical informatics as “the rational study of the way we think about patients, and the way that treatments are defined, selected and evolved. It is the study of how medical knowledge is created, shaped, shared and applied.” This definition is a great deal broader than just “computers in medicine,” and the vision implicit in Coiera's book is not merely of medical practice improved and assisted by computerised systems but of health care thoroughly transformed through the adoption of rational procedures. Importantly, these procedures are not necessarily the consequences of new technology but of …