Fix IT
Stories from healthcare IT
Prof Harold Thimbleby — See Change Fellow in Digital Health
| Summer 2020 |
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This is an extraordinary book: a potent and engaging compendium of revelatory stories, bold insights, wise advice, and fresh thinking. This book has the potential to revolutionize digital healthcare, and will be a source of inspiration to everyone, whether in healthcare or beyond. Prof Daniel Jackson |
I’m loving your book. Cancelled what I was doing this afternoon to carry on reading it. This is a brilliant and hugely enjoyable book which should be compulsory reading for anyone with high-level responsibility for patient care. Dr Martin Elliott |
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Harold Thimbleby turns tales of healthcare technologies’ limits and failures into engaging and instructive stories that are a pure joy to read. It’s a very rare book that makes me call or email my friends several times each hour with quotes or insights from every chapter. It’s an extraordinary book that forces me to change my medical informatics courses every week! Prof Ross Koppel |
Harold Thimbleby’s lifetime devotion to fixing the problems with medical devices and systems shines through in this amazing book. The profusion of compelling examples are told with stories of real patients who were harmed and heroic medical professionals who tried their best. The deadly dramas are lucidly told with literary skill and scientific integrity, which should inspire Hollywood films. Prof Ben Shneiderman |
Fix IT is a book about digital healthcare and how it impacts on all of us, whether patients or healthcare professionals. The unique contribution of this book is to explain, with lots of powerful stories, how surprisingly risky digital healthcare is, and how it can be made much safer. The book is divided into three parts:
- Diagnosis – Riskier than you think. You will learn about the unnoticed risks of digital healthcare, and the serious problems that arise when digital is misunderstood and misapplied.
- Treatment – Finding solutions. The problems are fixable. The solutions aren’t just about getting newer or more exciting stuff; the solutions are about thinking more clearly to understand what we need, and how to innovate, design and implement digital healthcare more reliably.
- Prognosis – A better future. There is a possible, much better, safer, and more effective digital healthcare for all of us. The final part of the book sketches the digital promise.
All chapters have lots of stories that’ll be of interest to both patients and healthcare professionals, but the digital in digital healthcare isn’t avoided. There are a few readable but more technical chapters, of special interest to programmers, developers and regulators — these more technical digital chapters are highlighted with a computer chip.
The book includes a generous bibliography for further reading, plus lots of notes referencing public and peer reviewed evidence.
Prof Harold Thimbleby is See Change Fellow in Digital Health, based at Swansea University in Wales.
Harold is Expert Advisor on IT to the Royal College of Physicians, a member of the World Health Organization’s Patient Safety Network, Patient Safety Council Member of the Royal Society of Medicine, and an advisor to the Clinical Human Factors Group and to the UK Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). He is also a patient. He has peripheral neuropathy, which makes activities like walking and writing painful and increasingly difficult.
Harold has been invited to talk in over 30 countries: he is a very popular speaker. Do invite him to talk about Fix IT and how to make healthcare safer. Do email him: harold@thimbleby.net
More details, including offprints of hundreds of articles and videos, are available from Harold’s website at www.harold.thimbleby.net
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