Health Informatics – Introduction

INTRODUCTION Health informatics is a wide-ranging science incorporating the complex mixture of people, organizations, illnesses, patient care and treatment. It is a scientific field that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and optimal use of biomedical information, data, and knowledge for problem solving and decision making. The field touches on all basic and applied fields in biomedical science and is closely tied to modern information technologies, notably in the areas of computing and communication. Health informatics looks into ways to optimize clinical knowledge creation, sharing and application to deliver better healthcare and to promote health.

The emergence of medical informatics as a new discipline is due in large part to the rapid advances in computing and communications technologies, an increasing awareness that the knowledge base of biomedicine is essentially unmanageable by traditional paper-based methods, and a growing conviction that the process of informed decision making is as important to modern biomedicine as is the collection of facts on which clinical decisions or research plans are made.

A term is currently used is Big Data. The term describes large and exponential growth and availability of data. These data could be structured or unstructured data. This is well defined as data that adhere to the following four articulated criteria. The first criteria is volume, which is considered to be an ever-increasing amount. With the emergence of various storage devices and the reduction of the storage cost it is made increasingly possible to manage this large volume of data. However, strict evaluation of…