Biomedical informatics

Biomedical informatics is a term used to describe the broad discipline that encompasses such subdomains as bioinformatics, clinical informatics, public health informatics, etc, and is most commonly used in this way in the USA. It is sometimes referred to as medical informatics or health informatics, and oustide the USA health informatics tends to be the preferred term for the larger domain encompassing the breadth of informatics as applied to health and healthcare. In the USA, the health informatics name has been discouraged in recent years because it tends to leave out the focus on biological sciences and the important subfield of biomedical informatics known as bioinformatics. Biomedical Informatics is concerned with the study and application of information technology and computer science as well as decision making, human problem solving, cognitive science, standards, policies, and human factors in the practice of biomedical science, medicine and healthcare.

The major areas encompassed by it are clinical informatics, clinical research informatics, dental informatics, nursing informatics, veterinary informatics, pharmacy informatics, imaging informatics, public health informatics, proteomics, genomics and drug design.