Health Informatics

About
Health informatics (also called Health Information Systems, health care informatics, healthcare informatics, medical informatics, nursing informatics, clinical informatics, or biomedical informatics) is a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include computers, clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, and (bio)medical research.

The international standards on the subject are covered by ICS 35.240.80[1] in which ISO 27799:2008 is one of the core components. Molecular bioinformatics and clinical informatics have converged into the field of translational bioinformatics.

History
World wide use of computer technology in medicine began in the early 1950s with the rise of the computers. In 1949, Gustav Wagner established the first professional organization for informatics in Germany. The prehistory, history, and future of medical information and health information technology are discussed in reference. Specialized university departments and Informatics training programs began during the 1960s in France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands. Medical informatics research units began to appear during the 1970s in Poland and in the U.S. Since then the development of high-quality health informatics research, education and infrastructure has been a goal of the U.S. and the European Union.

Early names for health informatics included medical computing, biomedical computing, medical computer science, computer medicine, medical electronic data processing, medical automatic data processing, medical information processing, medical information science, medical software engineering, and medical computer technology.

The health informatics community is still growing, it is by no means a mature profession, but work in the UK by the voluntary registration body, the UK Council of Health Informatics Professions has suggested eight key constituencies within the domain - information management, knowledge management, portfolio/programme/project management, ICT, education and research, clinical informatics, health records(service and business-related), health informatics service management. These constituencies accommodate professionals in and for the NHS, in academia and commercial service and solution providers.

Since the 1970s the most prominent international coordinating body has been the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

Links

 * e-Journal for Health Informatics
 * Article about informatics
 * UK Council for Health Informatics Professions, its principles, code and standards
 * Healthcare Informatics Magazine
 * Willison, Brian. Advancing Meaningful Use: Simplifying Complex Clinical Metrics Through Visual Representation.
 * UIC Health Informatics
 * Clinfowiki
 * Global Health Informatics Partnership