Medical Informatics - Specialities, Components, and Responsibilities

Introduction:

Healthcare or medical informatics is the fusion of healthcare, information technology, and business administration and guides all aspects of the healthcare experience, including clinical care, public health, nursing, and pharmacy. New technology is an essential part of medicine, and health informatics is no exception. Health informatics focuses on implementing and optimizing information systems that support clinical practice. It creates a framework that enables the flow of information to and from the stakeholders indulging in patient care.

Let us read more about it.

What Is Medical Informatics?

It is a speedily developing scientific field that deals with storing, restoring, and using biomedical data, information, and communication to solve problems and make decisions.

Medical or health informatics focuses on information principles, systems, and technologies as they will be applied to healthcare delivery. It improves the quality and cost of healthcare, informs us about the discoveries and causes, and cures of disease, and provides new career opportunities for people working in the healthcare sector.

It has specialized domains, including management science, engineering principles, and healthcare delivery systems.

It deals with four major interdisciplinary areas:

• Emerging technologies.

• Epidemiology and health management.

• Advanced statistics.

• Health system.

The outlook of this field is vast, and the program demonstrates uniqueness by providing varied options for practice and research.

What Are the Various Specialties in Medical Informatics?

The field is particularly suited to medical and computer science professionals with a master's or doctoral degree who wish to transition into this field. There exist several specialties, such as:

• Bioinformatics: This branch is concerned with storing, retrieving, sharing, and helping analyze information for research purposes and patient care.

Subspecialties include:

1. Chemical informatics.

2. Nursing informatics.

3. Dental Informatics.

• Public Health Informatics: This branch involves using technology to teach the public about health and health care and ensuring access to medical research.

• Organizational Informatics: This branch aims to ensure a smooth flow of communication within the medical organization.

• Social Informatics: It covers the social aspects of computer science, how information technology affects particular environments, and vice versa.

• Clinical Informatics: This field applies informatics for clinical research and patient care.

What Are the Various Components of Medical Informatics?

Medical informatics is diverse, and newcomers can easily be confused with the jargon used in this field. A basic introduction is, therefore, necessary for those interested in this field.

The following are the components of medical informatics:

• Algorithm: This process involves carrying out a complex task and breaking it into simple steps and decisions.

• Bioinformatics: It is the use of medical informatics in molecular biology.

• Checklist: It is a type of clinical decision tool that lists information about a patient before, during, or after an encounter.

• Coding System: It is a list of preferred items (alphanumeric code) that the user can draw. It includes patient data, a disease or drug name, etc. This approach makes it easier for the system (computer) to evaluate data using free texts or phrases.

• Data System: It is an information system concerned with capturing, processing, and storing patient data.

• Decision Tool: Any mechanical, electronic, or paper that collects or processes data from an individual and generates output that aids clinical decisions during the doctor-patient encounter.

• Clinical Information: It is the patient data set used to make clinical decisions.

• Communication: Communication is the exchange of information between agents such as humans or automated by using electronic media or paper.

• Confidentiality: This policy enables the patient to access only those who can view the person's data and restrict others, except rarely in emergencies and for the public good.

• Quality: The degree to which data items are complete, relevant, accurate, timely, detailed, and appropriately represented to support decision-making is data quality.

• Database: It is an organized collection of data in a machine-readable format that can be retrieved and processed automatically by a computer.

• The Decision Tree: The decision tree is the way to model a decision process as a tree with branches suggesting all possible intermediate states and outcomes.

• Registry: It collects a minimum database on a specific group of patients who have taken a particular treatment or procedure. They are used to explore and improve the quality of care.

• Telecare: It is a kind of telemedicine where patients (located in their own homes) are taken care of.

• Telemedicine: It is the use of electronic mediums to augment clinical consultations. It can be through telephone, video conferencing, email with images, etc.

What Are the Job Responsibilities Post Medical Informatics?

All the tasks given to professionals are related to information technology and its advantage in the healthcare industry. They are responsible for the following functions such as:

• Creating and maintaining new ways for medical facilities and practices to keep electronic health records.

• Improving communication between healthcare providers to ensure better patient outcomes.

• Analyzing data for research.

• Assisting with technology-dependent research.

What Are the Jobs Related to Medical Informatics?

The field is diverse and includes the following job titles such as:

• Chief Medical Information Officer: This is the top-level position. It involves ensuring that the organization's information technology systems are designed adequately to meet clinical, patient, and communication requirements. The responsibility of the medical officer is to develop and apply electronic health record software and applications, analyze medical data, ensure quality care, and conduct data analytics for research purposes.

• Health Informatics Director: The health informatics director is responsible for management reporting functions, actuarial management, and information technology strategy.

• Clinical Informatics Specialist: These professionals provide hands-on support and project management for using and implementing electronic medical record software to document patient care. This stream is usually opted for by existing medical professionals who have a keen interest in technology.

• Health Analytics Clinical Practitioner Manager: This branch calls on professionals to develop, design, and implement packaged software solutions for health and public industry businesses.

Conclusion:

Medical informatics is a sub-discipline of health informatics that deals with the study and application of methods to improve the management of patient data, population data, clinical knowledge, and other information related to patient care and public health. In this field, medical and computer science skills come together to improve healthcare and patient outcomes.

The professionals in this hybrid field use their medical knowledge and put technology to its best use for patient care and research settings. This field emerged after the invention of digital computers in 1940. It is a multidisciplinary branch that interacts with various fields such as clinical science, public health, computer and information science, etc. The professionals are performing valuable work, developing better ways to understand the disease and its outcomes, and identifying cures from global health to personalized medicine. Hence, the study of informatics is helping others live healthier lives.