Health informatics

Health informatics, Health care informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health and (bio)medical research.

Aspects of the field

architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling, and research
decision support systems in healthcare, including clinical decision support systems
standards (e.g. DICOM, HL7) and integration profiles (e.g. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) to facilitate the exchange of information between healthcare information systems - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content
controlled medical vocabularies (CMVs) such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), MEDCIN, Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC), OpenGALEN Common Reference Model or the highly complex UMLS - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers
use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making, sometimes called mHealth.
The international standards on the subject are covered by ICS 35.240.80 in which ISO 27799:2008 is one of the core components.
Molecular bioinformatics and clinical informatics have convered into the field of translational bioinformatics.

History

Medical informatics began to take off in the US in the 1950s with the rise of computers.

Early names for medical informatics included medical computing, medical computer science, computer medicine, medical electronic data processing, medical automatic data processing, medical information processing, medical information science, medical software engineering, and medical computer technology.

Since the 1970s the coordinating body has been the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA)

Medical informatics in the United States

The earliest use of computation for medicine was for dental projects in the 1950s at the United States National Bureau of Standards by Robert Ledley.

The next step in the mid 1950s were the development of expert systems such as MYCIN and INTERNIST-I. In 1965, the National Library of Medicine started to use MEDLINE and MEDLARS. At this time, Neil Pappalardo, Curtis Marble, and Robert Greenes developed MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) in Octo Barnett's Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the most commonly used programming language for clinical applications. The MUMPS operating system was used to support MUMPS language specifications. As of 2004^[update], a descendent of this system is being used in the United States Veterans Affairs hospital system. The VA has the largest enterprise-wide health information system that includes an electronic medical record, known as the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA). A graphical user interface known as the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) allows health care providers to review and update a patient’s electronic medical record at any of the VA's over 1,000 health care facilities.

In the 1970s a growing number of commercial vendors began to market practice management and electronic medical records systems. Although many products exist, only a small number of health practitioners use fully featured electronic health care records systems.

Homer R. Warner, one of the fathers of medical informatics, founded the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah in 1968, and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has an award named after him on application of informatics to medicine.

United States

In 2004 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formed the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT). The mission of this office is widespread adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) in the US within 10 years. See quality improvement organizations for more information on federal initiatives in this area.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), a private nonprofit group, was funded in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a set of standards for electronic health records (EHR) and supporting networks, and certify vendors who meet them. In July, 2006 CCHIT released its first list of 22 certified ambulatory EHR products, in two different announcements.