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.
An electronic health record (EHR) is the systematized collection of patient and population electronically stored health information in a digital format. These records can be shared across different health care settings. Records are shared through network-connected, enterprise-wide information systems or other information networks and exchanges. EHRs may include a range of data, including demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, vital signs, personal statistics like age and weight, and billing information.
A guideline execution engine is a computer program which can interpret a clinical guideline represented in a computerized format and perform actions towards the user of an electronic medical record.
Biomedical text mining refers to the methods and study of how text mining may be applied to texts and literature of the biomedical domain. As a field of research, biomedical text mining incorporates ideas from natural language processing, bioinformatics, medical informatics and computational linguistics. The strategies in this field have been applied to the biomedical literature available through services such as PubMed.
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.
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 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.
The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) specification is an XML-based markup standard intended to specify the encoding, structure, and semantics of a patient summary clinical document for exchange.
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.
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.
E-referrals or electronic referrals or electronic consultation is an electronic platform that enables the seamless transfer of patient information from a primary to a secondary treating practitioner's client management system. E-referrals have fast become the best replacement of paper-based referrals, and hold great potential toward the ultimate goal of seamless communication and information sharing between practitioners.
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.
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.
Lawrence Leonard Weed was an American physician, researcher, educator, entrepreneur and author, who is best known for creating the problem-oriented medical record as well as one of the first electronic health records.
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.
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.
