What is Medical Informatics?
The Medical Informatics FAQ (no relation) provides the following definition: “Biomedical Informatics is an emerging discipline that has been defined as the study, invention, and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information.” That FAQ also points here Aamir Zakaria, the author of the FAQ, emphasises that medical informatics is more concerned with structures and algorithms for the manipulation of medical data, rather than with the data itself. This suggests that one difference between bioinformatics and medical informatics as disciplines lies with their approaches to the data; there are bioinformaticians interested in the theory behind the manipulation of that data and there are bioinformatics scientists concerned with the data itself and its biological implications. (I believe that a good bioinformatics researcher should be interested in both of these aspects of the field.) Medical informatics, for practical re
The number of definitions of informatics is legion. One representative example from Greenes and Shortliffe is, “Medical informatics is the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including the information science and the technology to support these tasks. An intrinsically interdisciplinary field, medical informatics has a highly applied focus, but also addresses a number of fundamental research problems as well as planning and policy issues. Medical informatics is now emerging as a distinct academic entity. Healthcare institutions are considering, and a few are making, large-scale commitments to information systems and services that will affect every aspect of their organizations’ function.
Medical Informatics is the use and application of information technology for managing the delivery of healthcare. Medical Informatics is used in providing information systems for healthcare organizations, in organizing, analyzing and storing data and providing reports on utilization, costs, quality and outcomes of care, in electronic commerce applications in healthcare and in assisting patients to obtain and use information and communications to manage and improve their health.
