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 a branch of engineering and applied science.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Massachusetts is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and one of the founding members of Beth Israel Lahey Health. It was formed out of the 1996 merger of Beth Israel Hospital and New England Deaconess Hospital. Among independent teaching hospitals, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has ranked in the top three recipients of biomedical research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Research funding totals nearly $200 million annually. BIDMC researchers run more than 850 active sponsored projects and 200 clinical trials. The Harvard-Thorndike General Clinical Research Center, the oldest clinical research laboratory in the United States, has been located on this site since 1973.
The term virtual patient is used to describe interactive computer simulations used in health care education to train students on clinical processes such as making diagnoses and therapeutic decisions. Virtual patients attempt to combine modern technologies and game-based learning to facilitate education, and complement real clinical training. The use of virtual patients is increasing in healthcare due to increased demand for healthcare professionals and education of healthcare trainees, and provides learners with a safe practice environment. There are many formats from which a virtual patient may be chosen, but the overarching principle is that of interactivity. Virtual patients typically have mechanisms where information is parsed out in response to the learners, simulating how patients respond to different treatments. Interactivity can be created with questions, specific decision-making tasks, text composition, etc., and is non-sequential. Most systems provide quantitative and qualitative feedback. In some cases, virtual patients are not full simulations themselves, but are mainly based on paper-based cases; as they do not allow for physical examination or an in-depth medical history of an actual patient. There are certain drawbacks as crucial clinical findings may be missed due to the lack of examining patients in person.
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.
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.
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), is an American non-profit organization dedicated to the development and application of biomedical and health informatics in the support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care administration.
Don E. Detmer is professor emeritus and professor of medical education at the University of Virginia.
Health information technology (HIT) is health technology, particularly information technology, applied to health and health care. It supports health information management across computerized systems and the secure exchange of health information between consumers, providers, payers, and quality monitors. Based on a 2008 report on a small series of studies conducted at four sites that provide ambulatory care – three U.S. medical centers and one in the Netherlands, the use of electronic health records (EHRs) was viewed as the most promising tool for improving the overall quality, safety and efficiency of the health delivery system.
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.
Clinical point of care (POC) is the point in time when clinicians deliver healthcare products and services to patients at the time of care.
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.
David Bates is an American physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, known 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.
Daniel Zev Sands, M.D., M.P.H., is a primary care physician, specialist in medical informatics, and co-founder of the Society for Participatory Medicine, of which he is the Board Chair.
Igor Koralnik is an American physician, neurologist and scientist. He is one of the first physicians to study the neurologic complications caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and is a leading researcher in the investigation of the polyomavirus JC, which causes progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a disease of the central nervous system that occurs in immunosuppressed individuals.
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.
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.
