IT

Medical Informatics First Year Lecture
Medical information science is the science of using system-analytic tools to develop procedures (algorithms) for management, process control, decision making and scientific analysis of medical knowledge.

Medical Informatics comprises the theoretical and practical aspects of information processing and communication, based on knowledge and experience derived from processes in medicine and health care.

In medical informatics we develop and assess methods and systems for the acquisition, processing, and interpretation of patient data with the help of knowledge that is obtained in scientific research.
Health Informatics HI is the study of how health data, information, and knowledge are collected, stored, processed, communicated, and used to support the process of health care delivery to clients and providers, administrators, and organizations involved in health care delivery.


‘Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties of scientific information’
1976 Oxford English Dictionary (Collen,1996)

Names used for Medical Informatics
medical computer science 1 .
medical information science 2 .
computer application(s) in medicin 3 .
health informatics, and more specialized terms such as
nursing informatics .dental informatics and so on.

Computer Science and Informatics are practically synonyms: the difference in emphasizing the application aspect
Information Processing including Decision Making and Systems Analysis

Dr John Shaw Billings Surgeon General of Army
Founding editor of Index Medicus, Established National Library of Medicine
1st director of NLM in 1887

Internet Protocols
FTP (file transfer protocol) serves to exchange data with a remote computer
Telnet allows to run programs on a remote computer
Terms:
Upload - send TO a remote recipient
Download - receive FROM a remote sender

Origin of Medical Informatics
Field of Medical Informatics is >30 years
Origins of general discipline of ‘informatics’ traced to a Russian publication
Oznovy Informatiki (Foundations of Informatics) – 1968

Examples of Medical Informatics Areas
Hospital information systems
Electronic medical records & medical vocabularies
laboratory information systems
pharmaceutical information systems
radiological (imaging) information systems
Patient monitoring systems
Clinical decision-support systems
Diagnosis/interpretation
Therapy/management
Bioinformatics: Closely related tasks/methods

In Summary : Medical Informatics are
Multidisciplinary research, development, and application
inspired by and benefits underlying core scientific/engineering areas
Medical Decision support systems:include :
Tasks: Diagnosis, therapy
Mode: Human initiated, data driven, closed loop
Interaction style: Prescriptive, critiquing
Multiple diagnostic/therapeutic methodologies