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Writer's pictureJorge Guerra Pires

Health informatics: when medicine meets computer science


Nowadays we have a considerable amount of names associated with computer science in medicine. Names are, but not limited: bionformatics, systems biology, mathematical biology. When you try to understand their difference, it is so subtle that one cannot make a difference that works all the time. Recently I wanted to public a preprint in BioRxiv, but they have sent me to medRxiv. When submitting, I could not find bioinformatics, but I could find health informatics. I did a couple of researches, and here is what I have found. We have even books, several of them taking this title.


"Public health informatics focus on how to use information technology to educate the public. They study computer science and use their computer skills to keep track of current medical research. Also, they learn to design and implement new methods in the field."Source


Health informatics is a spectrum of multidisciplinary fields that includes study of the design, development and application of computational innovations to improve health care.[3] The disciplines involved combines medicine fields with computing fields, in particular computer engineering, software engineering, information engineering, bioinformatics, bio-inspired computing, theoretical computer science, information systems, data science, information technology, autonomic computing, and behavior informatics.[4] In academic institutions, medical informatics research focus on applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare and designing medical devices based on embedded systems.[2] In some countries term informatics is also used in the context of applying library science to data management in hospitals. Wikipedia

I see with good eyes that people are trying to find a common name, it can be hard for starters to know where to start with so many names doing sometimes precisely the same thing!


A video I did a couple of years ago, when trying to make sense of those names. It can be confusing!



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