Health informatics is the study and implementation of computer structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding, and management of medical information. It can be viewed as branch of engineering and applied science.
Renato Marcos Endrizzi Sabbatini is a retired professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and at the State University of Campinas Institute of Biology. He received a B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from Medical School of the University of São Paulo and a doctorate in behavioral neuroscience in 1977, followed by postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry's Primate Behavior Department. He founded the Center for Biomedical Informatics, and helped create the Brazilian Society for Health Informatics.
The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) is an independent organization that plays a role in promoting and furthering the application of information science in modern society, particularly in the fields of healthcare, bioscience and medicine. It was established in 1967 as a technical committee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). It became an independent organization in 1987 and was established under Swiss law in 1989.
The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) is a college of elected fellows from the United States and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. Initially incorporated in 1984, the organization later dissolved its separate corporate status to merge with the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI) and the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC) when the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) was formed in 1989. The College now exists as an elected body of fellows within AMIA, with its own bylaws and regulations that guide the organization, its activities, and its relationship with the parent organization. The College is fiscally self-sufficient, and its officers prepare and submit its financial plan annually for approval by the AMIA Board of Directors.
Edward ("Ted") Hance Shortliffe is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice, its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in the development of rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets and other areas, and its design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine.
Vimla Lodhia Patel is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist.
The American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI) was an organization created to encourage improvements in the state of medical care by encouraging the development of computer systems for that field.
Homer Richards Warner was an American cardiologist who was an early proponent of medical informatics who pioneered many aspects of computer applications to medicine. Author of the book, Computer-Assisted Medical Decision-Making, published in 1979, he served as CIO for the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, as president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was actively involved with the National Institutes of Health. He was first chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, the first American medical program to formally offer a degree in medical informatics.
Don E. Detmer is professor emeritus and professor of medical education at the University of Virginia.
Yves A. Lussier is a physician-scientist conducting research in Precision medicine, Translational bioinformatics and Personal Genomics. As a co-founder of Purkinje, he pioneered the commercial use of controlled medical vocabulary organized as directed semantic networks in electronic medical records, as well as Pen computing for clinicians.
Kevin Fickenscher, M.D., CPE, FACPE, FAAFP currently serves as the president/CEO of CREO Strategic Solutions, LLC – a consulting, advisory and management services company involved in all aspects of the telecare field – from care delivery to both undergraduate and continuing education related to virtual care delivery. He is also extensively involved in leadership development for organizations of all sizes. CREO is an organization which provides a network of senior-level people resources with extensive backgrounds in all aspects of healthcare. He has also previously served as the director for healthcare at The MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research and development corporation providing services to the federal government; interim CMO for AMC Health, a remote care management programs; and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the leading association of informaticians throughout the world. Prior to serving as CEO and president of AMIA, he was chief strategy and development officer for healthcare at Dell. He also developed and led the Information Systems Consulting Group and the International Healthcare as an executive vice president at Perot Systems prior to Dell purchasing the company in 2009. Fickenscher also served as the national director and partner for clinical transformation within the Global Health Solutions Group at Computer Sciences Corporation. Prior to these key roles, he served as the chief medical officer for a number of healthcare organizations, including: WebMD, Catholic Healthcare West – now part of CommonSpirit, a regional healthcare system based in San Francisco, California; and, Aurora Health Care, an integrated health system in eastern Wisconsin.
Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is a field that emerged in the 2010s to study health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.
Christopher G. Chute is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, physician-scientist and biomedical informatician known for biomedical terminologies and health information technology (IT) standards. He chairs the World Health Organization Revision Steering Group for the revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using clinical decision support. Bates has done work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry (CPOE), medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals. This work led the Leapfrog Group to call CPOE one of the four changes that would most improve the safety of U.S. healthcare. It also helped hospitals to justify investing in electronic health records and in particular, CPOE. Throughout his career, Bates has published over 600 peer reviewed articles and is the most cited researcher in the fields of both patient safety and biomedical informatics, with an h-index of 115. In a 2013 analysis published by the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, he ranked among the top 400 living biomedical researchers of any type. He is currently editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.
Lucila Ohno-Machado is a biomedical engineer and Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine.
Dean Forrest Sittig is an American biomedical informatician specializing in clinical informatics. He is a professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Executive Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative (CIRCLE). Sittig was elected as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in 2011, and was a founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics in 2017. Since 2004, he has worked with Joan S. Ash, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University to interview several Pioneers in Medical Informatics, including G. Octo Barnett, MD, Morris F. Collen, MD, Donald E. Detmer, MD, Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Nina W. Matheson, ML, DSc, Clement J. McDonald, MD, and Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD.
Marion Jokl Ball is a South African born United States (U.S.) citizen, scientist, educator, and leader in global Biomedical and Health Informatics. She holds the Raj and Indra Nooyi Endowed Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering, University of Texas at Arlington, is Presidential Distinguished Professor, College of Nursing and Health Innovation and serves as the Founding Executive Director, Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics (MICHI), University of Texas at Arlington. She is Professor Emerita, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and Affiliate Professor, Division of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. A member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), she is a pioneers of Informatics in Nursing and in Medicine and a founding member of the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER), a global grassroots initiative that formalized in 2006 to enable nurses and later, the multi-interdisciplinary healthcare workforce in 34 countries to best make use of Health Informatics principles, methods, tools, and resources. Ball is the author/editor of over 35 books and over 200 articles in the field of Health Informatics.
Morris Frank Collen was founder of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and an original member of the Permanente Medical Group, pioneering developer of Automated Multiphasic Health Testing (AMHT) systems, and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for Public Health and Clinical Screening, serving as a model for pre-paid healthcare at the national level. Collen was a Founder of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1984, and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in 1989. The Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence was established in his honor by ACMI in 1993. In 1971 Collen was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Richard Masys is an American biotechnologist and academic. He is an Affiliate Professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington.
Charles Safran is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is known for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the delivery and quality of healthcare, in particular clinical information systems.
