Medical informatics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_informatics

Electronic patient chart of a HIS

Medical Informatics is the name given to the application of information technology to healthcare. It is the:

Medical informatics is often called health informatics or biomedical informatics, and forms part of the wider domain of eHealth. These later-generation terms reflect the substantive contribution of the citizen & non-medical professions to the generation and usage of healthcare data and related information. Additionally, medical informaticians are active in bioinformatics and other fields not strictly defined as health care.

Aspects of the field

A HIS’s automatic immunization data entry in the patient’s admission module.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Immune_auto.jpg

These include:

• architectures for electonic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research.
• decision support systems in healthcare
• messaging standards for the exchange of information between health care information systems (e.g. through the use of the HL7 data exchange standard) - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content
• controlled medical vocabularies such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) or Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) - 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

More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_informatics