Health informatics

Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic health records, diagnostic test results, medical scans. 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 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. In academic institutions, medical informatics research focus on applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare and designing medical devices based on embedded systems. In some countries term informatics is also used in the context of applying library science to data management in hospitals. 'Clinical informaticians' are qualified health and social care professionals and 'clinical informatics' is a subspecialty within several medical specialties. 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: Health and Wellbeing in Practice Information Technologies and Systems Working with Data and Analytical Methods Enabling Human and Organizational Change Decision Making Leading Informatics Teams and projects.