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Health Informatics

Health informatics is the science of evaluating, implementing, and utilizing technology to manage all information related to the patient care delivery process at all levels: clinical, financial, technological, and enterprise. It is a multidisciplinary field, drawing from health information and computer science, psychology, sociology, and engineering. The history of the term, itself, is relatively recent. The Russian engineer and information scientist Alexander I. Mikhailov (1905–1988) is credited with first defining, around 1968, the term infor-matika as the field that studies the structure and general properties of scientific information and the laws of all processes of scientific communication. The English word informatics began to appear in the literature in the 1970s, and throughout the 1980s, the umbrella term health informatics emerged to encompass the continuum of information management, information science, and computer science focused on healthcare. When applied to a specific discipline, the application of informatics is focused on solving the problems of the discipline, such as medical informatics, nursing informatics, and public health informatics.

Types of Health Informatics

Health informatics encompasses many individual disciplines, which have further refined their foci in the field. For example, bioinformatics researchers develop or apply computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral, or health data. These tools include those used to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data. Consumer health informatics, on the other hand, is a subspecialty of medical informatics that studies the use of electronic information and communication to improve medical outcomes and the healthcare decision-making process from a patient or consumer perspective. Similarly, dental informatics expands the knowledge and understanding of the biological and biomedical processes in dentistry to improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow up of diseases through the examination of information handling and processing. Another type, health sciences librarianship and informatics, deals with health-related information, its structure, acquisition, and use. Health sciences librarianship and informatics are overlapping disciplines with strong conceptual links to the theoretical discipline of information science.

Also within the broad field of health informatics is medical informatics, the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including the information sciences and the technology to support these tasks. Nursing informatics is a related specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice. Pharmacy informatics, on the other hand, focuses on medication-related data and knowledge within the continuum of healthcare systems, including its acquisition, storage, analysis, use, and dissemination in the delivery of optimal medication-related patient care and health outcomes. Finally, public health informatics is the systematic application of information and computer science and technology to public health practice, research, and learning.

Role of Professional Associations

Health informatics disciplines can be understood, in part, through the interests of the membership of their professional associations. As an example, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), established in 1961, regularly holds an annual conference with published proceedings. At the 1999 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, the HIMSS attendees' foci of interest centered on the use of healthcare information systems in healthcare organizations from a business perspective, exploring ways to extract value from these systems. The conference also looked at the emergence of a number of healthcare goals, among them patient safety. By the 2007 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, the HIMSS had added sessions on information technology standards and building stronger connections between operations and technologies. Leadership emerged as a new theme, and initiatives appeared in public policy and community health. The scope had expanded to better represent both technological and patient care perspectives. The business process focus on quality had merged with patient safety and risk management. Other emerging topics recognized the need for research in clinical informatics to identify effective and efficient clinical practices and the need for both privacy and security measures to protect healthcare data.

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