The Most Important Milestone, Research Paper Example

Health care informatics is a relatively new entrant as a discipline within the bio-medical industry yet its growth from embryo to its present foetal stage has been technologically meteoric and intrinsically linked to the invention and advancement of digital computer technology. Following a brief definition of terms, this paper will take a look at the most important innovation in health care informatics-education, therebyanswering the all-important question of ‘why’.

Informatics is a science, the fuel that drives invention and defines information and knowledge management in research, clinical care, and public health. Informatics is used to develop, and evaluate new bio-medical methods; data mining, text processing, cognitive science, databases, and analyze public health data, and clinical research. Informatics science based-computer, decision, information, management, and cognitive sciences. Its raison d’etre is to create solutions that enhance biomedical science, population health, and quality of care.

Therefore, arudimentaryyet operable definition for Healthcare or Medical Informatics requires that one consider the field as a bona fide discipline. Informatics is by default dedicated to processing data, information, and knowledge, both in medical and in health care settings. The discipline itself finds its birth concurrent with that of the digital computer in the 1980s.With the advancements in computer technology, so too did health care and medical informatics advance as an essential information and communication tool which has supported developments in information processing in procedure, policy, practice, and organization. One  cannot think of medicine or health care in 2015 as remotely possible in the absence of participation of health care informatics yet fifty years ago that is precisely how the bio-medical world operated; without computersand therefore without health care informatics.

As short as itis, there is still no real documented history of the health care informatics field although about five years ago at the Hiroshima meeting of the IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association)in Davos, Switzerland, a decision was made toestablish a framework to document developments in health care informatics worldwide.

In the early part of this decade the IMIA published its recommendations with respect to education in health care informatics, which is now in wide international circulation and has been translated into many languages. This would seem to clearly identify health care informatics as a discipline and not something a practicing professional would just ‘like to have’ but rather something he or she would ‘need to have’ in order to function competently and confidently at any level in the healthcare informatics field.

Therefore, a universally accepted education standard in the health care informatics field asan internationally accepted discipline isnow acknowledgedin most countries,as are the IMIA recommendations on education very much agreed upon internationally as theacademicstandard for health care professionals within the discipline. Consequently much is expected of medical informatics to help in the achievement of health throughout the world, by contributing to the quality and efficiency of health care delivery while simultaneouslypioneeringbiomedical, computer, health, and information sciences research. This would seem to provide a very durable ‘why’ aninternational educational and academic standard is the most important milestone in the short fifty yearspan of health care informatics history.