Health informatics and evidence-based medicine - more than a marriage of convenience?

Abstract

matics is uniquely positioned at the intersection of information technology (IT) and the many disciplines involved or associated with medicine. Information processing and communication are centrally involved in virtually all healthcare activities, from obtaining and recording information about patients, communicating with healthcare professionals and accessing medical literature, to selecting diagnostic procedures, interpreting laboratory results and collecting clinical research data.Health informatics may be defined as the discipline that integrates biomedical sciences, computer sciences and healthcare policy, management and organization [2]. It embraces a number of different fields and activities including patient care, research, statistics, education, management and others that nominally fall within the framework of activities for providing better healthcare.

Flipped healthcare for better or worse

“…It is noteworthy that medical informatics and evidence-based medicine (EBM) emerged around the same time and overlap in many ways. 36,37 Consistent with prior research, our findings show that physicians often encounter barriers when answering clinical questions and seeking information online. [38][39][40] Medical information systems, for example, clinical support tools, tend to be organized by diseases, whereas information needs of physicians are focused on the patients' symptoms.…”

Studying technology use as social practice: the untapped potential of ethnography

“…Health informatics - the study of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in healthcare - is a rapidly expanding field of research strongly influenced by (though extending beyond) doctors with an interest in computers. It emerged at around the same time as evidence-based medicine (EBM) and overlapped with the latter in several areas of work, notably the development of ICT systems to support large-scale epidemiological surveys and clinical trials; routinization of the use of Medline and other electronic databases; standardization of clinical practice via guidelines and automated decision support; and innovations such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE) aimed at reducing medical error [ 2 - 4 ].…”

An analysis of the healthcare informatics and systems in Southeast Asia: a current perspective from seven countries

“…Information processing and communication in the healthcare sector are currently centrally involved in virtually all healthcare activities, from obtaining and recording information about patients, communicating with healthcare professionals and accessing medical literature, to selecting diagnostic procedures, interpreting laboratory results and collecting clinical research data (Georgiou, 2001). Recently, electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems, decision support systems (DSS), hospital information management systems (HIS) have been developed and are being widely used in a clinical context as well as in enterprise resource management systems on the administrative side (Von Lubitz and Wickramasinghe, 2006a,b).…”