Informatics is a term that I hear almost daily but struggle
to understand. None of the definitions I
have researched adequately describe it until I came across this article
published by our own Dr. Charles P. Freidman in the Journal of the American
Medical Informatics Association. I pasted the below excerpt and figure from the
article because I felt it was the section that was most clear about what
Informatics is. I encourage you to read the entire brief article. I hope that this helps someone else understand the term.
As illustrated in
figure 1, informatics may be seen as the location in discipline space where (1)
a particular set of relevant basic sciences meets (2) an application domain
that is typically a field of professional practice. Using a crude analogy to
elementary particle physics, informatics does not exist until these sciences
and an application domain interact. It follows that persons educated in
informatics are cross-trained. They have knowledge related to the basic
sciences and knowledge of the practice domain. Sciences basic to informatics
include, but are not limited to: information science, computer science,
cognitive science, and organizational science. Education in informatics will,
to some extent, address all four of these sciences. In a naming convention that
has evolved over the years, the application domain creates the prefix for a
particular branch of informatics. So cross-training between the relevant basic
sciences and the domain of medicine gives rise to ‘medical informatics.’
For the full article you can access it here.
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