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Overview

From ehealthpedia - Our Health Informatics Wiki

Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, medicine 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 not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems.

[edit] Aspects of the field

architectures for electronic health records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research
decision support systems in healthcare, including clinical decision support systems
standards (e.g. DICOM, HL7) and integration profiles (e.g. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) to facilitate the exchange of information between healthcare information systems - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content
controlled medical vocabularies (CMVs) such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC), OpenGALEN Common Reference Model or the highly complex UMLS - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers
use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making

[edit] Development

Medical informatics began to take off in the US in the 1950s with the rise of the microchip and computers.

Early names for medical informatics included medical 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.

Since the 1970s the coordinating body has been the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA)