Health Informatics: Definitions and Importance

The Information in Healthcare

• Health sciences involve highly complex procedures.
• Healthcare information is consistently produced, communicated, and changing.
• Information is derived from the combination of individual health data.
• Information arises from the analysis of numerical and boolean data, plus aspects like images and sounds.

Health Informatics Defined

• A wide-ranging science encompassing people, organizations, illnesses, patient care and treatment.
• A scientific field focused on storage, retrieval, sharing and usage of data for problem solving and decision making.
• The field interacts with basic and applied areas of biomedical science, closely associated with modern IT.
• Health informatics optimizes clinical knowledge creation, sharing, applications to improve healthcare and health promotion.

Why Health Informatics is Important

• It provides the information needed to make health decisions.
• Better information leads to better health decisions.
• Health care, management, planning, and policy all rely on thorough information.

Examples of Information in Healthcare

• Information regarding clinical, administrative, and financial.
• Information is used to help facilitate decision-making for nurses and doctors.

Elements of Informatics

• Acquisition: Capturing data produced during healthcare processes.
• Storage and Retrieval: Saving data so it can be accessed when needed.
• Communication: Transferring data from collection points to storage and ultimately to the point of use for analysis.
• Manipulation: Transforming and combining data to aggregate it.
• Display: Presenting data in an easily understandable and useful manner.

Historical Evolution of Health Informatics

• The area has evolved through different stages beginning with "Computers in Medicine".
• Development continued with "Medical Computer Science".
• The science then proceeded into the more specific term "Science of Informatics in Medicine".
• Modern versions include "Dental informatics", "Nursing informatics", "Medical informatics", and "Health informatics".

Definitions of Health Informatics

• World Health Organization: Health informatics is an umbrella term for application of methodologies and techniques of IT, computing and communication.
• These items support disciplines such as medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry
• Edward H. Shortliffe: Health informatics concerns the cognitive, information processing, the tools of medical practice and the technology to support tasks.

Subsets of Health Informatics

• Common subsets: clinical, medical, public health, consumer health, population health, nursing, dental, nutrition, pharmacy, biomedical, translational bioinformatics, and computational health.
• Clinical research informatics and informatics in active and healthy aging should also be considered.

Clinical Informatics (CI)

• A subset of health informatics for clinicians in healthcare service applications.
• A blend of information technology within clinical care processes, typically inside a health system.
• Also referred to as applied clinical informatics and operational informatics.
• It includes a wide range of topics from clinical decision support to the design of provider order entry systems to visual images.

Medical Informatics (MI)

• MI is the study of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning.
• MI also describes the application of computers to various aspects of healthcare and medicine.

Public Health Informatics (PHI)

• The field optimizes the use of information to improve public health practice and health policy.
• PHI operates at the intersection of public health and computer science.
• PHI relies on IT systems that address assessment of population health and policy development.

Consumer Health Informatics

• Analyzes consumer information needs via studies with methods of making information accessible for them.
• Models and integrates consumer preference into medical systems
• Sits at the crossroads of disciplines like nursing, public health, promotion, library science, and communication.
• Bridges the gap between patients and resources while looking at informatics from multiple perspectives.

Population Health Informatics

• Population health is the outcomes of a group of individuals, and how those outcomes are distributed within the group.
• Intersection of public health informatics and consumer informatics.
• It studies populations via secondary analysis of massive data collections, called "big data".
• PHI also applies data science to social genome data to answer fundamental questions about humanity.
• PHI is an emerging area at the crossing of social, behavioral, economic and health sciences, computer science, and statistics.
• Quantitative methods and computational tools are used to answer fundamental questions about populations.
• The studied groups are often defined by geography, but could also contain ethnic groups, employees, prisoners etc.

Nursing Informatics

• Nursing science is integrates with information management to identify, manage and communicate data, information and knowledge.
• It supports nurses in all roles and settings, in order to achieve desired outcomes.

Dental Informatics

• Involves computer and health science to improve education, management, research and practice.
• Concerned with the intersection of health informatics and dentistry as a whole.

Nutrition Informatics

• The retrieval, storage, and use of data for food and nutrition for problem solving and decision making.
• Utilizes Clinical EHRs with clinical, consumer, food management, public health, research, retail, and public policy.

Pharmacy Informatics

• A scientific field focuses on medication-related data within the healthcare system, including the acquisition, storage, analysis, and dissemination.
• This aids medication-related patient care and health outcomes
• The ASHP released a statement on the role of pharmacists in informatics with five broad areas of responsibility: information management, knowledge delivery, data analytics, clinical informatics, and change management.

Biomedical Informatics

• Biomedical science, especially biology and biochemistry.
• It studies the usages of data for scientific inquiry, problem solving, driven by efforts to improve health.

Bioinformatics

• Tools and methods that are used to develop software, generally for understanding biological data.
• Related to research in molecular biology.
• Includes signal processing to biology, combining statistical and mathematical techniques to compute results.

Translational Bioinformatics

• Development of interpretive methods to transform voluminous biomedical and data into proactive health.
• Includes the development of techniques for the integration of biological and clinical data and evolution of clinical informatics
• The outcome is disseminated to biomedical scientists, clinicians, and patients.

Computational Health Informatics

• CHI integrates computer science techniques into healthcare.
• Healthcare provides a wide variety of problems that can be tackled by using computational techniques.
• Informaticists study the principles of computer science that allow for algorithms and systems to be developed.

Big Data

• It uses significant exponential growth of data as structured or unstructured data.
• The first criteria is volume, with devices available to storage data and the reduction of storage cost.
• Secondly it follows the criteria is velocity, as the data are generated and is needs to be managed for good analysis.
• Thirdly Data needs variety from e.g. data laboratory, pharmacy, radiology, and transaction/billing.
• The data needs to be gathered from trustable sources and verifiable.

Information Hierarchy

• The hierarchy goes from Data, which represents observations and is the lowest level.
• Next is information which is the aggregation of data that makes decision making.
• Knowledge which is information that is true.
• At the top, there is wisdom, which represents principles by integrating knowledge

Informatics Concepts

• Information Architecture (IA) is design of information environments, with the crucial component is healthcare technology systems.
• Part helping structure information.
• Frameworks that collect storage and personalized features across different aspects.

Human-Computer Interaction

• Researches the design and use of computer technology and focuses on the interfaces between users and computers.
• Observes ways that humans interact with computers in healthcare setting, to design technologies that let humans interact effectively in healthcare.

Computations

• With conceptual models there is need to segregate parts of the physical world and define the models.
• The model is created to design and implement the model of specific criterion like diabetes or blood glucose levels.
• Data must be relevant to be part of the model.

Saudi 2030 Vision and Health

• The healthcare system is undergoing a transformation to improve quality, safety and efficiency of care.
• A move of the MOH and nation partners agencies to modernization in to HIT.
• To EHRs and "meaningful users" to the exchange of data in healthcare.
• the "5 pillars" are quality, safety, efficiency, engagement of families, coordination in care, and ensure privacy for person health.