Health Informatics

Informatics refers to the process of transforming data and information into useful knowledge for professionals in a variety of fields. The advent of the information age has created vast and potentially overwhelming quantities of data, and informatics seeks to harness the power of data science, statistics, and analytics to yield actionable insights as well as data visualizations to present them in an easily-understandable format. Informatics is thus becoming an important part of many industries seeking to use data to meet human needs by improving quality of service or creating new products.

Informatics is perhaps most prominently used in the field of nursing, where nurse informaticists use electronic healthcare data to provide decision support for doctors, streamline reporting, and improve the quality and safety of patient-centered care. It is also increasingly used in materials science, where materials data science and informatics can be used to improve the understanding, use, selection, development, and discovery of materials in the engineering field. And in the realm of biology, bioinformatics is playing an important role in understanding large and complex biological datasets, particularly in the realm of genomics.‎

Healthcare is the prevention and treatment of illness as well as the improvement of wellbeing by medical professionals. This term can be used to describe healthcare provided to individuals, but often refers to the healthcare delivery systems responsible for providing health services to communities more broadly, including entire countries. Access to healthcare is thus important for promoting and maintaining the physical and mental wellbeing of the general public.

Healthcare is especially important to learn about because it is becoming more complex as health economics change. In the United States and other countries, the question of how to provide affordable and effective health insurance has been a politically challenging one, as healthcare costs have grown alongside aging populations - and existing government policies to ensure healthcare access have struggled to keep up. The provision of insurance and health services more broadly may be covered by public entities, private companies, or both, and different countries are attempting to meet these needs with different combinations of policy frameworks.

As in other areas of the economy, the growing use of information technology holds promise to transform this sector. Health informatics is helping medical professionals manage patient data far more efficiently, facilitating better treatment and enhanced collaboration between different healthcare providers. The power of this approach will be further enhanced by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which will allow doctors to harness more information for diagnosis and develop data-driven decision support systems for the evaluation of different treatments for patients.‎

Before you start learning informatics, it can be helpful to have strong critical thinking and analysis skills as well as experience working with computers and programming languages. If you are considering specializing in a field like health informatics, it may be beneficial to have experience working in the health care industry or take courses in health science or biology. Other useful skills include strong communication, observation, and analysis skills.‎