Health informatics combines communications, information technology (IT), and health care to enhance patient care and is at the forefront of the medical technological revolution. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science.
A medical classification is used to transform descriptions of medical diagnoses or procedures into standardized statistical code in a process known as clinical coding. Diagnosis classifications list diagnosis codes, which are used to track diseases and other health conditions, inclusive of chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart disease, and infectious diseases such as norovirus, the flu, and athlete's foot. Procedure classifications list procedure code, which are used to capture interventional data. These diagnosis and procedure codes are used by health care providers, government health programs, private health insurance companies, workers' compensation carriers, software developers, and others for a variety of applications in medicine, public health and medical informatics, including:
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics.
Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) is a database and universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations. First developed in 1994, it was created and is maintained by the Regenstrief Institute, a US nonprofit medical research organization. LOINC was created in response to the demand for an electronic clinical care and management database and is publicly available at no cost.
SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms is a systematically organized computer-processable collection of medical terms providing codes, terms, synonyms and definitions used in clinical documentation and reporting. SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world. The primary purpose of SNOMED CT is to encode the meanings that are used in health information and to support the effective clinical recording of data with the aim of improving patient care. SNOMED CT provides the core general terminology for electronic health records. SNOMED CT comprehensive coverage includes: clinical findings, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, body structures, organisms and other etiologies, substances, pharmaceuticals, devices and specimens.
Faye Glenn Abdellah was an American pioneer in nursing research. Abdellah was the first nurse and woman to serve as the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States. Preceding her appointment, she served in active duty during the Korean War, where she earned a distinguished ranking equivalent to a Navy Rear Admiral, making her the highest-ranked woman and nurse in the Federal Nursing Services at the time. In addition to these achievements, Abdellah led the formation of the National Institute of Nursing Research at the NIH, and was the founder and first dean of the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). A few of Abdellah's more passionate interests in public health included the importance of long-term care planning for elderly patients; the need to strengthen nursing school infrastructure; and the necessity of patient-centered approaches in nursing. In 2000, Abdellah was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. During her acceptance speech, Abdellah made the following quote: "We cannot wait for the world to change. .. Those of us with intelligence, purpose, and vision must take the lead and change the world. .. I promise never to rest until my work has been completed!”
Alan L. Rector is a retired Professor (emeritus) of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK.
Medcin, is a system of standardized medical terminology, a proprietary medical vocabulary and was developed by Medicomp Systems, Inc. MEDCIN is a point-of-care terminology, intended for use in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, and it includes over 280,000 clinical data elements encompassing symptoms, history, physical examination, tests, diagnoses and therapy. This clinical vocabulary contains over 38 years of research and development as well as the capability to cross map to leading codification systems such as SNOMED CT, CPT, ICD-9-CM/ICD-10-CM, DSM, LOINC, CDT, CVX, and the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System for nursing and allied health.
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.
The Omaha System is a standardized health care terminology consisting of an assessment component, a care plan/services component, and an evaluation component. Approximately 22,000 health care practitioners, educators, and researchers use Omaha System to improve clinical practice, structure documentation, and analyze secondary data. Omaha System users from Canada, China, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Turkey, the United States, and Wales, have presented at Omaha System International Conferences.
The Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System is a standardized, coded nursing terminology that identifies the discrete elements of nursing practice. The CCC provides a unique framework and coding structure. Used for documenting the plan of care; following the nursing process in all health care settings.
Apache cTAKES: clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System is an open-source Natural Language Processing (NLP) system that extracts clinical information from electronic health record unstructured text. It processes clinical notes, identifying types of clinical named entities — drugs, diseases/disorders, signs/symptoms, anatomical sites and procedures. Each named entity has attributes for the text span, the ontology mapping code, context, and negated/not negated.
Donald Allen Bror Lindberg was the Director of the United States National Library of Medicine from 1984 until his retirement in 2015. He was known for his work in medical computing, especially the development of PubMed. He won the 1997 Morris F. Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics.
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.
Noémie Elhadad is an American data scientist who is an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. As of 2022, she serves as the chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Her research considers machine learning in bioinformatics, natural language processing and medicine.
Marion Jokl Ball is a South African-born American 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.
Suzanne B. Bakken Henry is an American nurse who is a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. Her research considers health equity and informatics. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, American College of Medical Informatics and American Academy of Nursing.
Howard Leslie Bleich was an American nephrologist, distinguished professor, and pioneer in the field of medical informatics. He was known for his contributions to the integration of computer technology in clinical medicine and his research in the field.
Judith J. Warren is an American nurse, educator, and researcher, known for being a pioneer in the field of nursing informatics. Her work has focused on integrating nursing science, information technology, and patient care. She holds the title of professor emerita at the University of Kansas School of Nursing.
Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence is the highest honor presented by the American College of Medical Informatics. It is awarded annually to "an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to biomedical informatics has made a lasting impression on healthcare and biomedicine". The award was established in 1993 to honor Morris F. Collen, the founder of biomedical informatics, and was also the recipient of the first year's award. Recipients of this award have made significant contributions to medical informatics research, education, or leadership, advancing healthcare through innovative uses of information technology.
