MEDICAL INFORMATICS
During the era of information science, medical informatics
is emerging as a new specialty and perhaps, this branch of science will be as
fundamental to the practice of medicine as the study of anatomy and physiology.
Medical informatics is the name given to the study of
clinical information and communication process. It is the national study of the
way we think about patient, the way the treatment is defined, selected and
evolved, i.e. how medical knowledge is created, shapened and applied. This
science is also includes the study how we organize ourselves to create and run
health care organization.
The simplified definition of medical informatics is the
“computer application in medical care”. The other complicated definition is it
is an emerging discipline involving the study, invention, and implementation of
structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and
management of medical information. The end objective of medical informatics is
the coalescing of data, knowledge and the tools necessary to apply that data
and knowledge in the decision making process, at the time and place that a
decision needs to be made. The focus on the structures and algorithms necessary
to manipulate the information separates medical informatics from other medical
disciplines where information content is the focus.
Thus we find that medical informatics is concerned with
information processing and information management carried out in medical
knowledge context and uses the following methods of information technology:
acquisition, processing, control, interpretation, transformation, transfer and
presentation of data.
The sciences contributing medical informatics include
computer science, artificial intelligence, decision theory, statistics, cognitive
science, information management, healthy policy and of course medical science.
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