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In order to improve the management of environment and human health, this paper presented the new concept of human health, and developed the environmental health informatics. Its features, structure and major approach for application have been summarized. The future development of environmental health informatics was discussed.
Education in medical informatics is needed not only for those who want to become specialist in this area but also for health professionals. Since students, depending on the program they are enlisted in, require different types of knowledge and skills in medical informatics, curricula should be adapted to those needs. The curriculum structure also depends on the expert level the students want to attain. This contribution presents the knowledge and skills levels for different groups of students and presents two examples of curricula.
The Health Informatics field is becoming more challenging as the globalization of economy, the advancement of the technology as well as innovative breakthroughs are being incorporated in the discipline. In Europe as well as in other countries the funding into the research areas of this field is increasing. In this chapter, a brief overview of the field as well the trends of Health Informatics are discussed with respect to the new dimensions that the education of the health care professionals has to tackle in the foreseeable future.
OBJECTIVE: To facilitate tissue engineering strategies determination with informatics tools. METHODS: Firstly, tissue engineering experimental data were standardized and integrated into a centralized database; secondly, we used data mining tools (e.g. artificial neural networks and decision trees) to predict the outcomes of tissue engineering strategies; thirdly, a strategy design algorithm was developed, and its efficacy was validated with animal experiments; lastly, we constructed an online database and a decision support system for tissue engineering. RESULTS: The artificial neural networks and the decision trees respectively predicted the outcomes of tissue engineering strategies with the predictive accuracy of 95.14% and 85.26%. Following the strategies generated by computer, we cured 18 of the 20 experimental animals with a significantly lower cost than usual. CONCLUSION: Informatics is beneficial for realizing safe, effective and economical tissue engineering.
Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is the emerging discipline that aims to facilitate integration of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics for the purpose of accelerating discovery and the generation of novel diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. Building on the success of the European Commission-funded BIOINFOMED Study, an INFOBIOMED Network of Excellence has been constituted with the main objective of setting a structure for a collaborative approach at a European level. Initially formed by fifteen European organizations, the main objective of the INFOBIOMED network is therefore to enable the reinforcement of European BMI at the forefront of these emergent interdisciplinary fields. The paper describes the structure of the network, the integration approaches regarding databases and four pilot applications.
Health informatics is a well established and important multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary field that not only involves informatics but also medicine, nursing, engineering, biology and other-related subjects. A co-ordination of this field at a postgraduate level has become an important issue now in Europe where other European Community programs such as the Telematics for Health Care will require during the Fifth and Sixth Framework Programmes (2000-2006) adequate human resources of higher potential and knowledge. A European M.Sc. course met all the above objectives. The curriculum was developed according to previous experiences in similar programmes. Recently the course has been organised on the basis of an Inter-University nature with the participation of 5 Greek Universities. The paper aims at providing a current description of the academic programme and a brief evaluation of the implementation phase.
With the development of biotechnology, especially the projects which lead to high throughout experimental results, lots of data have been jammed in every related fields, and broke the balance between data and knowledge in these fields. It is urgent to refine these data, and let them be more productive. To avoid these data being decaying into rubbish, technology and theory such as database, statistics, data mining, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence had been applied into biologic and medical study fields. So, a new standalone research subject--biomed-informatics has been formed. This paper reviewed the application of biomed-informatics in cardiovascular research, and gave the view for the future development of this subject.
Since 1999, a librarian-administered course entitled Computer Literacy for Healthcare Professionals has been required of all incoming occupational, physical, and respiratory therapy students at Stony Brook University. Outcome data from pretests/posttests and student self-assessments over a 3-year period from 2000 to 2002 demonstrate the effectiveness of the training program and of library-sponsored instruction. This study evaluated whether curriculum-integrated informatics training by librarians is effective in enabling allied health students to acquire and retain literature-searching skills. Pretests and posttests measured the impact of instructional intervention upon student acquisition of literature-searching skills; a second posttest ("post5-test") measured skill retention. The intervention group consisted of 179 subjects enrolled in baccalaureate occupational, physical, and respiratory therapy programs between 2000 and 2002; the control group consisted of 48 physician assistant students who had no formal instruction in literature searching. Student self-assessments provided qualitative outcome measures. Paired t test analysis showed that the mean posttest score for the intervention group was considerably greater at the p < 0.01 level (t = 14.868; p < 0.001) than the mean pretest score. The change is statistically significant, and the null hypothesis can be rejected. The results of this study support the conclusion that library-sponsored informatics instruction is effective in improving student acquisition and retention of literature-searching skills.
Medicine is increasingly practiced through the application of information sciences. Medical informatics deals with optimal information use within bioinformatics, imaging, clinical, and population health domains. Population health informatics plays an important role in that it critically informs practice in each of the other domains. Proper functioning of health care systems requires an advanced health information network that supports clinical care, personal health management, population health, and research. But this infrastructure does not yet exist in the United States. A number of federal initiatives are underway to address this problem, including the development of a framework for a national health information network and funding for implementation. This network will be facilitated by federal leadership, but public and private partnerships, and state, regional, and local implementation and policy development will play a critical role. In this article, we describe several Wisconsin initiatives that are keys to developing a strategic framework and building the state's electronic health information infrastructure.
OBJECTIVE: This study was part of the Medical Library Association's Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section's project to map the nursing literature. It identified core journals in nursing informatics and the journals referenced in them and analyzed coverage of those journals in selected indexes. METHOD: Five core journals were chosen and analyzed for 1996, 1997, and 1998. The references in the core journal articles were examined for type and number of formats cited during the selected time period. Bradford's Law of Scattering divided the journals into frequency zones. RESULTS: The time interval, 1990 to 1998, produced 71% of the references. Internet references could not be tracked by date before 1990. Twelve journals were the most productive, 119 journals were somewhat productive, and 897 journals were the least productive. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association was the most prolific core journal. The 1998 journal references were compared in CINAHL, PubMed/MEDLINE, Science Citation Index, and OCLC Article First. PubMed/MEDLINE had the highest indexing score.
Consumer health informatics (CHI) is a rapidly evolving sub-discipline of medical informatics. Such developing fields typically share common needs, such as harmonizing terms and building a common foundation of research methods and instruments. The authors describe a pilot study to conceptualize and develop a "CHI toolbox," a repository of existing methods and instruments across relevant established fields. The challenges encountered in attempting to organize concepts in a nascent, interdisciplinary field are discussed. The authors' experiences in creating a comprehensive CHI toolbox suggest that a larger, concerted effort to develop a similar product by members of the relevant research communities could accelerate the development of common terms, operational definitions, variables, and instruments within the CHI field.
We survey the "evolution" of the field of Medical Informatics by describing trends in volume(quantity) of Medical Informatics-indexed publications, identifying major journals of publication and their focus areas and presenting trends in impact factor scores during the 1994-2003 period. Changes in total impact-scores suggest an increasing trend of publication in journals of higher impact.
Current graduate degree programs in Brazil cannot fulfill the demand for highly trained health informatics practitioners. We have developed an intensive six-month program to train 20 students per year. They will receive partial subsidy from our bilateral training program and receive the title of Specialist in Health Informatics. They will benefit from a curriculum involving coursework and collaborative research designed by Brazilian and US-based faculty.
This study presents preliminary results from a visual study of a new dataset of forty years of citation data from publications of twelve journals in the medical informatics field covering the time period from 1964-2004. Highly cited and pivotal documents, areas of specialization within medical informatics, and emergence of research topics are visually mapped through a progressive knowledge domain visualization approach to detecting and visualizing trends and patterns in scientific literature.
OBJECTIVES: To contribute a new perspective on recent investigations into the scientific foundations of medical informatics (MI) and bioinformatics (BI). To support efforts that could generate synergies and new research directions. METHODS: MI and BI are compared and contrasted from a philosophy of science perspective. Historical examples from MI and BI are analyzed based on contrasting viewpoints about the evolution of scientific disciplines. RESULTS: Our analysis suggests that the scientific approaches of MI and BI involve different assumptions and foundations, which, together with largely non-overlapping communities of researchers for the two disciplines, have led to different courses of development. We indicate how their respective application domains, medicine, and biology may have contributed to these differences in development. CONCLUSIONS: An analysis from the point of view of the philosophy of science is characteristic of established scientific disciplines. From a Kuhnian perspective, both disciplines may be entering a period of scientific crisis, where their foundations are questioned and where new ideas (or paradigm shifts) and a progressive research programme are needed to advance them scientifically. We discuss research directions and trends both supporting and challenging integration of the subdisciplines of MI and BI into a unified field of biomedical informatics (BMI), centered around the evolution of information cybernetics.
OBJECTIVES: In the paper we described the partial achievements reached by the EuroMISE Center in research and higher education, supporting better healthcare in future information society. METHODS: Through the research cooperation, the EuroMISE Centre suggests publicly available tools and methods that allow the application of new technologies for various healthcare organizations and citizens, with a special focus on the national environment of the Czech Republic. It provides a platform for a greater level of research cooperation with the usage of the most up-to-date information and communication technologies and a wide spectrum of clinical and genetic data and knowledge. RESULTS: Results of research and higher education of the EuroMISE Centre in the field of Biomedical Informatics are described in outputs of national and European projects. Further results have been published and/or presented at national and international meetings and incorporated in education and healthcare practice. CONCLUSIONS: The long-term effect of postgraduate doctoral education in the field of biomedical informatics consists in the rapid increase of scientists that are needed in the Czech Republic to reach the goals of information society in health care. The multidisciplinary research at the EuroMISE Center moves towards direct usage in the informational support of diagnostics and therapy, mining of the medical databases, and in the customization of healthcare based on the clinical and genetic profile of a patient.
In Crossing the Quality Chasm, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Quality of Health Care in America identified the critical role of information technology in designing a health system that produces care that is "safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable" (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, 2001, p. 164). A subsequent IOM report contends that improved information systems are essential to a new health care delivery system that "both prevents errors and learns from them when they occur" (Committee on Data Standards for Patient Safety, 2004, p. 1). This review specifically highlights the role of informatics processes and information technology in promoting patient safety and summarizes relevant nursing research. First, the components of an informatics infrastructure for patient safety are described within the context of the national framework for delivering consumer-centric and information-rich health care and using the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) (Thompson & Brailer, 2004). Second, relevant nursing research is summarized; this includes research studies that contributed to the development of selected infrastructure components as well as studies specifically focused on patient safety. Third, knowledge gaps and opportunities for nursing research are identified for each main topic. The health information technologies deployed as part of the national framework must support nursing practice in a manner that enables prevention of medical errors and promotion of patient safety and contributes to the development of practice-based nursing knowledge as well as best practices for patient safety. The seminal work that has been completed to date is necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve this objective.
Recent developments in biomedical informatics research have afforded possibilities for great advances in health care delivery. As in most domains, there is a gulf between technologic artifacts and end users, which compromises the culture of safety in the workplace. This necessitates a broadening of disciplinary boundaries to consider cognitive and social factors related to the design and use of technology. The authors argue for a place of prominence for cognitive science in understanding nursing factors associated with patient safety. Cognitive science provides a framework for the analysis and modeling of complex human performance. Studies of clinical cognition can meaningfully inform and shape design, development, and assessment of information systems. Furthermore, they have a decisive impact on whether information technology has a positive influence on human performance and are especially important in understanding and promoting safe practices. These issues are discussed in the context of clinical informatics with a focus on nursing practice.