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.
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 University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) is a public academic health science center in Houston, Texas, United States. It was created in 1972 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents. It is located in the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world. It is composed of six schools: McGovern Medical School, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, UTHealth School of Dentistry, Cizik School of Nursing, UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and UTHealth School of Public Health.
Neuroinformatics is the emergent field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
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.
Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.
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.
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.
Allied Academies is a reportedly fraudulent corporation chartered under the laws of North Carolina. Its postal address is in London, United Kingdom. It presents itself as an association of scholars, with supporting and encouraging research and the sharing and exchange of knowledge as its stated aims. The organization consists of 30 affiliate academies, which provide awards to academics and publish academic journals both online and in hard copy for members. Since 2015 the organization has been listed on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". It is in a partnership with OMICS Publishing Group which uses its website and logo. In 2018, OMICS owner Srinubabu Gedela declared that he had informed the Nevada court that Allied Academies was a subsidiary of OMICS International. During a conference in 2018, they falsely listed a prominent chemist among its organizing committee who had not agreed to this and was not affiliated with Allied Academies.
Sir John Irving Bell is a Canadian-British immunologist and geneticist. From 2006 to 2011, he was President of the United Kingdom's Academy of Medical Sciences, and since 2002 he has held the Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He was since 2006 Chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research (OSCHR) but in 2020 became a normal member. Bell was selected to the Vaccine Taskforce sometime before 1 July 2020. Bell is also on the board of directors of the SOE quango Genomics England.
Joan S. Ash is Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Portland, OR. She holds master's degrees in library science Columbia University, health science, and business administration Portland State University. Her doctorate is in Systems Science: Business Administration from Portland State. She is currently the Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Medical Library Association, and on the United States National Library of Medicine's Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee. She is co-author of Clinical Information Systems: Overcoming Adverse Consequences.
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.
The College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine is one of the three colleges of the University of Edinburgh.
Yuval Shahar is an Israeli professor, physician, researcher and computer scientist
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.
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.
Robert A. Greenes is a pioneer in the field of biomedical informatics (BMI). His work has focused on knowledge representation, decision support, and human-computer interaction for health and healthcare. He was co-developer of the MUMPS System and Language in the 1960s. He is an Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University.
