What Is Health Informatics?
Health informatics also known as medical informatics is the scientific filed concerned with biomedical information, knowledge and data. It concentrates on the storage and retrieval of this information and its optimal use to solve problems and make important decision. It is closely connected to information technologies of the modern age and touches on all applied and basic fields of biomedical science. Health informatics uses system analytic tools to scientifically develop algorithms or procedures for process control, management, scientific analysis and decision making of medical knowledge. It comprises of practical and theoretical aspects of information communication and processing, based on experience and knowledge, derived from health care and medicine processes.
Information management comprises a major activity of the medical professional. There are currently several forces have put their heads together to focus on this function. Health informatics deals with cognitive, communication tasks and information processing of medical education, research and practice including the technology and information science to support these tasks. It is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field, with an extremely applied focus, however it also addresses several essential research problems as well as policy issues and planning. There have been many years of development to support medicine infrastructure. Now a new generation of tools and systems are aimed at medical professionals and health care managers to support decision-making, education, communication and numerous other activities of the medical profession.
Hospitals and other health care institutions have already begun to make commitments on a large scale to services and information systems that will affect virtually every aspect of institutions function. There has been establishment of a number of academic units of health informatics in several medical schools and there is high demand for informatics professionals to instruct medical stuffs and serve on faculties. Health informatics is coming out as a distinct academic entity.
Public health informatics is the methodical application of computer science, information and technology to practices, learning and research of public health. Before the invention of the internet, data from public health in the United States was recorded in paper form and kept away in relevant agencies of public health. If the officials were to computerize the data, they would need a distinct process of data entry, store it in the various formats available then and have mainframe computers to use standard process of batch to analysis it.
Since the introduction of the World Wide Web, agencies of public health with sufficient resources of information technology have made the transition to web-based data collection of public health and some have even switched to the most modern technology which is automated messaging. Due to the variability and complexity of public health data, similar to health care data in general, the question of data modeling presents an exacting challenge. Also due to the inconsistency of the incoming data to public health control, data quality guarantee is also a key issue. The need to extract functional information of public health from the accumulation of data available requires the informatics of public health to familiarize themselves with a variety of analysis tools.