Health informatics

Health informatics is the study and implementation of computer science to improve communication, understanding, and management of medical information. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science.

The health domain provides an extremely wide variety of problems that can be tackled using computational techniques.

Health informatics is a spectrum of multidisciplinary fields that includes study of the design, development, and application of computational innovations to improve health care. The disciplines involved combine healthcare fields with computing fields, in particular computer engineering, software engineering, information engineering, bioinformatics, bio-inspired computing, theoretical computer science, information systems, data science, information technology, autonomic computing, and behavior informatics.

In academic institutions, health informatics includes research focuses on applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare and designing medical devices based on embedded systems. In some countries the term informatics is also used in the context of applying library science to data management in hospitals where it aims to develop methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, An umbrella term of biomedical informatics has been proposed.

Dutch former professor of medical informatics Jan van Bemmel has described medical informatics as the theoretical and practical aspects of information processing and communication based on knowledge and experience derived from processes in medicine and health care.

The Faculty of Clinical Informatics has identified six high level domains of core competency for clinical informaticians:

Clinical informaticians use their knowledge of patient care combined with their understanding of informatics concepts, methods, and health informatics tools to:

Clinicians collaborate with other health care and information technology professionals to develop health informatics tools which promote patient care that is safe, efficient, effective, timely, patient-centered, and equitable. Many clinical informaticists are also computer scientists.