Veterinary informatics

Veterinary informatics applies information technology to healthcare. Veterinary informatics and the larger field of medical informatics is often called health care informatics or biomedical informatics, and forms part of the wider domain of eHealth. These later-generation terms reflect the substantive contribution of the citizen & non-medical professions to the generation and usage of healthcare data and related information. Additionally, medical informaticians are active in bioinformatics and other fields not strictly defined as health care.

Aspects of the field
These include:
 * architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research.
 * decision support systems in healthcare
 * messaging standards for the exchange of information between health care information systems (e.g. through the use of the HL7 data exchange standard) - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content
 * controlled medical vocabularies such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) or Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers.
 * use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making

History
Medical informatics began in the 1950s with the rise of usable computation devices, computers.

Early names for medical informatics included medical computing, medical computer science, computer medicine, medical electronic data processing, medical automatic data processing, medical information processing, medical information science, medical software engineering and medical computer technology.

The earliest use of computation for veterinary medicine was ...