Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby

The book is addressed to healthcare workers (students, physicians or researchers) who have basic programming skills, and are interested to use these skills to help their patients, or to advance the medical science. The author includes in this work fundamental algorithms and methods of medical informatics with application to medical data sets, as well as step-by-step instruction and concrete examples. The script examples provided work both on Windows based PCs and on Macs and are excellent resources even for beginners who are not very familiarized with any of the three programming languages (Perl, Phyton or Ruby). In addition, this book provides references to excellent public medical data resources, covers some of the computational methods of biomedical informatics, including autocoding, data scrubbing and data deidentification. The author also included examples of questions that biomedical scientists can address, in relation to medical data and open source programming language. He maintains a Website with updated resources related to all his published books. In the context of a new era of medicine with widespread implementation of electronic medical records and electronic health records, this textbook is an invaluable resource.