Healthcare Informatics and Information Systems
Healthcare Informatics, also sometimes refers to medical informatics, clinic informatics, or public care informatics, is a multidisciplinary field in health academic and industrials. It uses cutting-edge IT and computing technology to improve healthcare systems with high quality and high performance efficiency, and low cost. Therefore the disciplines intend to use various terminologies, principles, and methodologies defined and developed in many areas such as computer science, information science and technology, systems engineering, management science, behavior science, finance and economics, government science and social sciences.
The domain has a broad relevant subdomains including radiology informatics, nursing informatics, pathology informatics, pharmacy informatics, oncology informatics, cardiology informatics, public health informatics, et al. The ultimate is to improve patient-oriented healthcare service in systems.
The multidisciplinary domain hierarchic structure can be found in the following figure. In our classification, we consider medical science and healthcare industrials, together with multidiscinplines as the fundamental layer to support healthcare informatics as while. In the healthcare informatics, we loosely classify four catalogues: (1) clinical informatics or medical informatics, (2) public health informatics, (3) service-based informatics (including nursing, pharmacy and dental informatics), and (4) bioscience research and/or clinical trial based bioinformatics (including clinical bioinformatics, human bioinformatics, and computational bioinformatics). The clinical information or medical informatics mainly includes pathology informatics, radiology or medical imaging informatics, cardiology informatics, oncology informatics, other medical field related informatics (which may not be listed hereby but also important). The public healthcare informatics but only include traditional studies on human diseases and their resources and prevention healthcare measurements, but also community, home or family, and consumer based informatics. Recently demands are higher in informatics for healthcare and medical education. It is obviously more and more special medical and healthcare fields establish their relevant informatics, since information technology has been playing very important roles in the field studies and practices.
