Health Tech

A dental office, a vet clinic and a hospital look like different businesses, and underneath they run on the same records: a patient, the people and places that treat them, appointments, encounters, coded procedures, the coverage that pays for some of it and the ledger that bills the rest. Every one of those records lives in several systems at once (a practice management system on a server in the back office, an EHR, a clearinghouse, a payer, a patient engagement platform texting reminders from the front desk), each speaking its own standard (HL7 v2, FHIR, X12, NCPDP, DICOM) and each answerable to HIPAA, the Cures Act's information blocking rules, state health privacy laws and the payer's contract. This book surveys how the industry does each piece, benchmarked across Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth, Dentrix, Open Dental, ezyVet, Weave, NexHealth, Phreesia, Availity, Waystar, Surescripts, Medidata, Veeva and the others, with no single vendor as the model, and how you'd build it, extending one core data model chapter by chapter.

It reads in ten parts, plus a reference. The Business: the parties and how money flows, the landscape, how a practice runs, business models for health software and selling into health care. Records and Interoperability: EHR and PMS records, HL7 v2, FHIR, SMART apps, documents and images, exchange networks, patient matching and code sets. Rules of the Record: HIPAA in practice, information blocking and certification, state health privacy, consent and security. Revenue Cycle: eligibility, claims, clearinghouses, remittance, denials, prior authorization, patient financial experience, coding compliance and value-based care. Practice Management and Patient Engagement: integrating with practice management systems, scheduling and online booking, reminders and recall, phones, texting, intake, reviews, payments, membership plans, veterinary, dental and specialty practices, multi-location groups, and analytics and the AI front desk. Care Delivery: telehealth, e-prescribing, labs, referrals, hospitals, digital health and patient portals. Payers, Pharma and Clinical Trials, and Beyond the US. Running the Platform: architecture, AI, operations, metrics, migrations and data use. Reference: a glossary of every term, grouped by part.