Health informatics

Brain imaging informatics BoneXpert software for assisting physicians
Imaging Informatics Computer-based telemedicine devices in operating room
Decision-making information systems in healthcare Neuroinformatics in healthcare

Medical informatics introduces information processing concepts and machinery to the domain of medicine.

Health informatics is the study and implementation of computer structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding, and management of medical information.[1] 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.[1]

Health informatics is a spectrum of multidisciplinary fields that includes study of the design, development and application of computational innovations to improve health care.[2] The disciplines involved combines medicine 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.[3]

In academic institutions, medical informatics research focus on applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare and designing medical devices based on embedded systems.[1] In some countries term informatics is also used in the context of applying library science to data management in hospitals. In this meaning health informatics aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data,[4] An umbrella term of biomedical informatics has been proposed.[5]

There are many variations in the name of the field involved in applying information and communication technologies to healthcare, public health, and personal health, ranging from those focused on the molecular (e.g., genomic), organ system (e.g., imaging), individual (e.g., patient or consumer, care provider, and interaction between them), to population-level of application. A spectrum of activity spans efforts ranging from theory and model development, to empirical research, to implementation and management, to widespread adoption.

'Clinical informaticians' are qualified health and social care professionals and 'clinical informatics' is a subspecialty within several medical specialties.

  1. ^ a b c Sami HR, Reynolds NC (7 May 2021). Talavera F, Busis NA, Lorenzo N (eds.). "Medical informatics in neurology: What Is Medical Informatics?, Signal Processing, Image Processing". EMedicine: Medscape's Continually Updated Clinical Reference.
  2. ^ Nadri H, Rahimi B, Timpka T, Sedghi S (August 2017). "The Top 100 Articles in the Medical Informatics: a Bibliometric Analysis". Journal of Medical Systems. 41 (10): 150. doi:10.1007/s10916-017-0794-4. PMID 28825158. S2CID 7309349.
  3. ^ Shortliffe EH, Cimino JJ, eds. (2014). Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine (4th ed.). London: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-4474-8. ISBN 978-1-4471-4473-1.
  4. ^ Imhoff, M (2002). "Health Informatics". Evaluating Critical Care. pp. 255–256. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-56719-3_18. ISBN 978-3-540-42606-6.
  5. ^ Shortliffe, Edward Hance; Cimino, James J.; Chiang, Michael F., eds. (2021). Biomedical Informatics: Computer applications in health care and biomedicine (5th ed.). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-58720-8.