Chapter 1 Overview of Health Informatics
Why did health informatics develop?
1. Growth and volume of medical knowledge, patient information, understanding of human health. 2. Increase in specializations has created and need to share and coordinate patient information. 3. Clinicians need access to medical information expeditiously regardless of time and day.
What are some of the challenges existing today that require an improvement in informatics?
1. Technology is advancing faster than healthcare professionals can assimilate into their practice. 2. Critical limitation of IT that manages data and not information. This creates a mismatch in what clinicians need (information) and what they have (ineffective ways to manage information).
When did health informatics begin?
1950-1960
What is bioinformatics?
Bioinformatics is a sub-field of biomedical informatics that is concerned with biological data, DNA and genomic information as opposed to clinical, public health and other data.
What are some other names for health informatics?
Clinical informatics, medical informatics, and biomedical informatics. If the informations science deals primarily with actual application and programs and not theory, it is called applied informatics.
What is the central concern of informaticians?
Health information technology provides the tools to generate information from data that humans can turn into knowledge and wisdom, thus improving human decision making with usable information.
What is the name for someone who practices informatics?
Informaticist or informaticians
What is information?
Information is meaningful data or facts from which conclusions can be drawn by humans or computers. Computers do not process information, they process data. This is a fundamental problem and challenge in informatics.
What is the definition of informatics?
It is a science of information and the blending of people, biomedicine and technology.
What happened with the advent of EHR, health information exchange (HIE) and multiple hospital electronic information systems?
It provided the ability to collate and analyze large amounts of data to improve health and financial decisions.
What is biomedical informatics?
It's a broader term referring to medical, dental, nursing, public health, pharmacy, medical imaging and veterinary informatics.
What is knowledge?
Knowledge is information that is justifiably considered to be true. i.e. A rising PSA level suggests the likelihood of cancer.
What are the different levels of data?
Level 1 paper forms with serious limitations in regards to sharing, storing and analyzing. Level 2 data could be scanned in documents. Level 3 data are entered into a computer and are data that are structured and retrievable but not computable. Level 4 data are computable, meaning electronic, capable of being stored in data fields and computable because it is in a format that disparate computers can share (interoperable) and interpret (analyzable).
What is wisdom?
Wisdom is the critical us of knowledge to make intelligent decisions and work through situations of signal versus noise. I.e. A rising PSA could mean a prostate infection and not cancer.
What is data?
data are symbols or observations reflecting differences in the world. Datum is the singular and is the lowest level of abstraction such as a number in a database. There is no meaning associated with data. Computers process data rapidly and accurately.
Health informatics definition- dynamic
health informatics is the field of information science concerned with management of healthcare data and information through the application of computers and other technologies. It is more about applying information in the healthcare field than actual technology (ie IT position). Technology merely facilitates the collection, storage, transmission of data.
