Medical informatics
In its most general sense medical informatics (also called health informatics) is the application of information technology to healthcare. This is, of course, a very broad field, but at present, the term informatics has come to be used in a more narrow sense as referring to:
- The organization and representation of information in healthcare
- The development and use of controlled vocabularies in healthcare and computer systems used in healthcare
- More generally, the development and use of ontologies as an aid to managing health related information
- Clinical decision support, both as a theoretical and a practical (engineering) problem
Another important area of study is patient record systems and, in particular, the electronic health record (EHR). This is an area that poses a number of technical challenges, but issues such as usability, patient safety and privacy are obviously of paramount importance. Another interesting area is mobility and portability of information. Obviously, in critical care situations it is highly desirable to have access to information that may not be maintained locally (such as adverse reactions), but making this information available raises significant privacy concerns. It also poses a number of technical challenges because systems that are developecd independently may use very disimilar means of representing and storing information. Health information systems must also be convenient to use, and sufficiently comprehensive to be of value to health care providers. If they do not add value to traditional means of information management (such as paper charts, they are unlikely to be used.
Bioinformatics
The use of information technology in biology is the focus of bioinformatics. Generally speaking, the focus of bioinformatics is rather different, emphasizing sequence analysis, quantitative analysis of protein structure, and similar problems. It is a matter of debate how fundamentally different the two fields are, though the emphasis on healthcare delivery gives medical informatics a decidely different focus. On the one hand, it is argued that advances in medical technology will lead to a tighter linkage of the two fields. Others argue that medical informatics is already a field with clearly defined goals and problems, and that any links between the two fields are speculative at present.
Standards
There are two (sometimes competing) standards developing organizations that have focused on developing standards for the representation and interchange of information in informatics. One is Health Level Seven (HL7), and the other is ASTM International, specifically the Technical Committee E31 (Healthcare Informatics).